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POOLS OF SILENCE 


BY 


H. DE VERE STACPOOLE 



PART ONE 






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THE 


POOLS OF SILENCE 




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NEW YORK 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 


1909 


Copyright igno, hy 
H. DE VERE STACPOOLE 


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CHAPTER I ^ 

A LECTURE OF THENARD’s 

T HE sun was setting over Paris, a blood-red and 
violent-looking sun, like the face of a bully 
staring in at the window of a vast chill room. 

The bank of cloud above the west, corrugated by 
the wind, seemed not unlike the lowermost slats of a 
Venetian blind ; one might have fancied that a great 
finger had tilted them up whilst the red, callous, cruel 
face took a last peep at the frost-bitten city, the frost- 
bound country — Montmartre and its windows, winking 
and bloodshot; Bercy and its barges; Notre Dame, where 
icicles, large as carrots, hung from the lips of the gar- 
goyles, and the Seine clipping the cite and flowing to the 
clean but distant sea. 

It was the fourth of January and the last day of Felix 
Thenard’s post-graduate course of lectures at the Beau- 
jon Hospital. 

Post-graduate lectures are intended not for students, 
using the word in its limited sense, but for fully fledged 
men who wish for extra training in some special sub- 
ject, and Thenard, the famous neurologist of the Beaujon, 
had a class wdiich practically represented the whole con- 
tinent of Europe and half the world. Men from Vienna 

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4 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


and Madrid, Germany and Japan, London and New York, 
crowded the benches of his lecture room. Even the 
Republic of Liberia was represented by a large gentleman, 
who seemed carved from solid night and polished with 

palm oil. 

Dr. Paul Quincy Adams, one of the representatives 
of America at the lectures of Thenard, was just reach- 
ing the entrance of the Beau j on as the last rays of sun- 
set were touching the heights of Montmartre and the 
first lamps of Paris were springing alight. 

He had walked all the way from his rooms in the 
Rue Dijon, for omnibuses were slow and uncomfort- 
able, cabs were dear, and money was, just at present 
the most unpleasant thing that money can convert itself 
into — an object. 

Adams was six feet two, a Vermonter, an American 
gentleman whose chest measurements were big, almost, 
as his instincts were fine. He had fought his way up, 
literally from the soil, putting in terms as seaside cafe 
waiter to help to pay his college fees; putting aside every- 
thing but honour in his grand struggle to freedom and 
individual existence, and finishing his college career 
with a travelling scholarship which brought him to Paris. 

Individualism, the thing that lends something of 
greatness to each American, but which does not tend to 
the greatness of the nation, was the mainspring of this 
big man whom Nature had undoubtedly designed with her 
eye on the vast plains, virgin forests, and unfordable 
rivers, and across whose shoulder one half divined the 
invisible axe of the pioneer. 



A LECTURE OF THENARD’S 


5 


He was just twenty-three years of age, yet he looked 
thirty : plain enough as far as features go, his face was a 
face to remember in time of trouble. It was of the 
American type that approximates to the Red Indian, 
and you guessed the power that lay behind it by the set 
of the cheek-bones, the breadth of the chin and the res$- 
fulness of the eyes. Like the Red Indian, Paul Quincy 
Adams was slow of speech. A silent man with his 
tongue. 

He entered the hospital and passed down a long cor- 
ridor to the cloak room, where he left his overcoat anp 
from there, by another corridor, he found his way to the 
swing-door of the lecture theatre. It wanted five minutes 
to the hour. He peeped over the muffing of the glass; 
the place was nearly full, so he went in and took his seat, 
choosing one at the right hand end of the first row of the 
stalls — students’ vernacular for the lowest row of the 
theatre benches. 

The theatre was lit with gas. It had whitewashed 
walls bare as the walls of a barn; a permanent black- 
board faced the audience, and the air was suffocatingly 
hot after the crisp, cold air of the streets. It would be 
like this till about the middle of the lecture, when Alphonse 
the porter would pull the rope of the skylight and ven- 
tilate the place with an arctic blast. 

This room, which had once been an anatomical theatre, 
and always a lecture room, had known the erect form of 
Lisfranc; the stooping shoulders of Majendie had cast 
their shadow on its walls; Flourens had lectured here on 
that subject of which he had so profound a knowledge- 1 ^ 



6 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


the brain; the echoes of this room had heard the foun- 
dations of Medicine shift and change, the rank heresies 
of yesterday voiced as the facts of to-day — and vice versa. 

Adams, having opened his notebook and sharpened 
his pencil, sat listening to the gas sizzling above his 
head; then lie turned for a moment and glanced at the 
men behind him: the doctor from Vienna in a broadlv 
braided frock-coat with satin facings, betraying himself 
to all men by the end of the clinical thermometer protrud- 
ing from his waistcoat pocket; the two Japanese gentle- 
men — brown, incurious, and inscrutable — men from 
another world, come to look on; the republican from 
Liberia, and the rest. Then he turned his head, for the 
door on the floor of the theatre had opened, giving entrance 
to Thenard. 

Thenard was a smallish man in a rather shabby frock- 
coat; his beard was scant, pointed, and gray-tinged; he 
had a depressed expression, the general air of a second- 
rate tradesman on the verge of bankruptcy; and as he 
entered and crossed to the estrade where the lectur e 
table stood and the glass of water, he shouted some words 
vehemently and harshly to Alphonse, the theatre atten- 
dant, who, it seemed, had forgotten to place the box of 
coloured chalks on the table — the sacred chalks which the 
lecturer used for colouring his diagrams on the blackboard. 

One instantly took a dislike to this shabby looking 
bourgeois , with the harsh, irritable voice, but after awhile, 
as the lecture went on, one forgot him. It was not the 
profundity of the man^s knowledge, great though it was, 
that impressed one; or the subtlety of his reasoning or 








































































































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A LECTURE OF THENARD’S 7 

the lucidity of his expression, but his earnestness, his 
obvious disregard for everything earthly but Truth. 

This was borne in on one by every expression of his 
face, every gesture of his body, every word and every 
tone and inflection of his voice. 

This was the twelfth and last lecture of the course. 
It was on the “Brain Conceived as a Machine Pure and 
Simple.” 

It was a cold and pitiless lecture, striking at the 
root of poetry and romance speaking of religions, n ot 
religion, and utterly ignoring the idea which stands 
poised like a white- winged Victory over all other ideas — 
the Soul. 

It was pitiless because it did these things* and it was 
terrible because it was spoken by Thenard, for he was 
just standing there, a little, oldish man, terribly con- 
vincing in his simplicity, absolutely without prejudice, 
as ready to acknowledge the soul and its attributes as to 
refuse them, standing there twiddling his horsehair 
watch-chain, and speaking from the profundity of his 
knowledge with, at his elbow, a huge army of facts, 
instances, and cases, not one of which did not support 
his logical deductions. 

I wish I could print his lecture in full. I can only 
give some few sentences taken at haphazard from the 
peroration. 

“The fundamental basis of all morality can be ex- 
pressed by the words Left — or Right. ‘Shall I take 
the path to the right> when my child is being threatened 
with death by a pterodactyl, or shall I take the path to 



I 


8 THE POOLS OF SILENCE 

the left when a mastodon is threatening to put a foot on 
my dinner. ? 

44 The prehistoric man asking himself that question 
in the dawn of time laid the foundation of the world’s 
morality. Do we know how he answered it? Yes — 
undoubtedly he saved his dinner. 

44 The prehistoric woman crouching in the ferns, 
wakened from sleep by the cries of her child on the left 
and the shouting of her man on the right, found herself 
face to face with the question, ‘Shall I court self-de- 
struction in attempting to save It , or shall I seek safety 
with Him ?’ Do we know how she answered that ques- 
tion ? Undoubtedly she took the path to the left. 

“The woman’s Right was the man’s Left, and she 
took it not from any motive of goodness but just because 
her child appealed to her as powerfully as his dinner 
appealed to the man. And which was the nobler instinct ? 
In prehistoric times, gentlemen, they were both equally 
noble, for the instinct of the man was as essential to the 
fact that you and I are here gathered together in enlight- 
ened Paris, as the instinct of the woman. 

“Right or Left? That is still the essence of morals 
— all the rest is embroidery. Whilst I am talking to 
you now, service is being held at the Madeleine, the 
Bourse is closed (looking at his watch), but other gaming 
houses are opening. The Cafe de Paris is filling, the Little 
Sisters of the Poor are visiting the sick. 

“We feel keenly that some people are doing good and 
Some people are doing evil. We wonder at the origin 
of it all, and the answer comes from the prehistoric forest. 





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A LECTURE OF THENARD’S 


9 


“‘I am Determination. I can choose the Right or 
I can choose the Left. Whilst dwelling in the man’s 
heart my choice lies that way, in the woman’s heart 
that way. 

'“I am not religion, but between the man and the 
woman I have created an essential antagonism of motive 
which will be the basis of all future religions and 
systems of ethics. I have already dimly demarcated 
a line between ferocity and greed, and a thing which 
has yet no name, but which will in future ages be 
called Love. 

“‘I am a constant quantity, but the dim plan I have 
traced in the plastic brain will be used by the ever-building 
years; spires and domes shall fret the skies, priests unroll 
their scrolls of papyri, infinite developments of the simple 
basic Right and Left laid down by me shall combine to 
build a Pantheon of a million shrines to a million gods — 
who are yet only three: the tramp of the mastodon, the 
cry of the child in the pterodactyl’s grip, and myself, 
who in future years shall be the only surviving god of the 
three — Determination.’ 

“The Pineal Gland had no known function, so Des- 
cartes declared it to be the seat of the soul. ‘There 
is nothing in here. Let us put something in,’ and he 
put in the idea of the soul. That was the old method- 

“Morphology teaches us now that the Pineal Gland 
is the last vestige of an eye which once belonged to a 
reptile long extinct. That is the new method; the results 
are not so pretty, but they are more exact.” 



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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


“You have finished your post-graduate work, and 
I suppose you are about to leave Paris like the others. 
Have you any plans ?” 

The lecture was over, the audience was pouring out 
of the theatre, and Adams was talking to Thenard, whom 
he knew personally. 

“Well, no,” said Adams. “None very fixed just at 
present. Of course I shall practise in my own coun- 
try, but I can’t quite see the opening yet.” 











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CHAPTER II 

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DH. DUTHIL 


of 


^HENARD, with his case hook and a bundle 

papers under his arm, stood for a moment in 
thought. Then he suddenly raised his chin. 

“How would you like to go on a big-game shooting 
expedition to the Congo ?” 

*‘Ask a child would it like pie,” said the American, 
speaking in English. Then, in French, “Immensely, 
monsieur. Only it is impossible.” 


“Why?” 

“Money.” 

“Ah, that ’s just it,” said Thenard. “A patient 
of mine. Captain Berselius, is Starting on a big- 

game shoot-ing expedition to the Congo. He requires 
a medical man to accompany him, and the salary 
is two thousand francs a month and all things 

found ” 

Adams’s eyes lit up. 

“ Two thousand a month! ” 

“Yes; he is a very rich man. His wife is a 

patient of mine. When I was visiting her yester- 

day the Captain put the thing before me — in fact, 
gave me carte-blanche to choose for him. He requires 


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THE TOOLS OF SILENCE 


the services of a n^edical man — an Englishman if 
possible ” 

“But I’m an Americai^’ssaid Adan^s. 

“It is the same thing,” replied Thenard, with a 
little laugh. “You are all big and strong and fond 
t pf guns and danger.” 

He had taken Adams by the arm and was leading 
.him down the passage toward the entrance hall of the 
hospital. 

“The primitive man is strong in you all, and that 
is why you are so vital and important, you Anglo-Saxons, 
Anglo-Celts, and Anglo-Teutons. Come in here.” 

He opened the door of one of the house-surgeon’s 
grooms. 

A youngish looking man,, with a straw-coloured beard, 
was seated before the fire, with a cigarette between his lips. 

He rose to greet Thenard, was introduced to Adams, 
and, drawing an old couch a bit from the wall, he bade 
his guests be seated. 

The armchair he retained himself. One of the legs 
was loose, and he was the only man in the Beau j on who 
had the art of sitting on it without smashing it. This 
he explained whilst offering cigarettes. 

Thenard, like many another French professor, unoffi- 
cially was quite one with the students. He would snatch 
a moment from his work to smoke a cigarette with them; 
he would sometimes look in at their little parties. I 
have seen him at a birthday party where the cakes and 
ale, to say nothing of the cigarettes and the unpawned 
banjo, were the direct products of a pawned microscope* 



DR DUTHIL 


13 


I have seen him, I say, at a party like this, drinking a 
health to the microscope as the giver of all the good things 
on the table — he, the great Thenard, with an income of 
fifteen to twenty thousand pounds a year, and a reputa- 
tion solid as the four massive text-books that stood to his 
name. 

“Duthil,” said Thenard, “I have secured, I believe, 
a man for our friend Berselius.” He indicated Adams 
with a half laugh, and Dr. Duthil, turning in his chair* 
regarded anew the colossus from the States. The great* 
large-hewn, cast-iron visaged Adams, beside whom 
Thenard looked like a shrivelled monkey and Duthil like 
a big baby with a beard. 

“Good/’ said Duthil. 

'‘A better man than Bauchardy,” said Thenard. 

“Much,” replied Duthil. 

“Who, then, was Bauchardy?” asked Adams, amused 
rather by the way in which the two others were discussing 

him. 

“Bauchardy?” said Duthil. “Why, he was the last 
man Berselius killed.” 

“Silence,” said Thenard, then turning to Adams, 
“Berselius is a perfectly straight man. On these hunt- 
ing expeditions of his he invariably takes a doctor with 
him; he is not a man who fears death in the least, but he 
has had bitter experience of being without medical assis- 
tance, so he takes a doctor. He pays well and is entirely 
to bo trusted to do the right thing, as far as money goes. 
On that side the contract is all right. But there is another 
Side — the character of Berselius. A man, to be thO 



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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


companion of Captain Berselius, needs to be big and 
strong in body and mjnd # or he would be crushed by the 
hand of Captain Berselius. Yes, he is a terrible man in 
a way — un homme affreux — a man of the tiger type — 
and he is going to the country of the big baboons, where 
there is the freedom of action that the soul of such a man 
desires ” 

‘‘In fact,” said Adams, “he is a villain, this Captain 
Berselius ?” 

“Oh, no,” said Thenard, “not in the least. Be quiet, 
Duthil, you do not know the man as I do. I have studied 
him; he is a Primitive ” 

“An Apache,” said Duthil. “Come, dear master, 
confess that from the moment you heard that this 
Berselius was intent on another expedition, you deter- 
mined to throw a foreigner into the breach. ‘No 
more French doctors, if possible/ said you. “Is not 
that so?” 

Thenard laughed the laugh of cynical confession, 
buttoning his overcoat at the same time and preparing 
to go. 

“Well, there may be something in what you say, 
Duthil. However, there the offer is — a sound one 
financially. Yes. I must say I dread that two thousand 
francs a month will prove a fatal attraction, and, if Mr. 
Adams does not go, some weaker man will. Well, 
I must be off. 

“One moment,” said Adams. “Will you give me 
this man’s address ? I don’t say I will take the post, 
but I might at least go and see him.” 


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DR. DUTHII 


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“Certainly,” replied Thenard, and taking one of his 
own cards from his pocket, he scribbled on the back of it — 


CAPTAIN ABMAND BERSILIUS 
14 AVENUE MALAKOFF 


Then he went off to a consultation at the Hotel Bristol 
on a Balkan prince, whose malady, hitherto expressed by 
evil living, had suddenly taken an acute and terrible turn 
and Adams found himself alone with Dr. Duthil. 

“That is Thenard all over,” said Duthil. 4 He is 
the high priest of modernism. He and all the rest of the 
neurologists have divided up devilment into provinces, 
and labelled each province with names all ending in enia 
or itis. Berselius is a Primitive, it seems; this Balkan 
prince is — I don’t know what they call him — sure to be 
something Latin, which does not interfere in the least 
with the fact that he ouo-ht to be boiled alive in an anti- 

O 

septic solution. Have another cigarette.” 

“Do you know anything special against Captain 
Berselius?” asked Adams, taking the cigarette. 

“I have never even seen the man,” replied Duthil, 
“but from what I have heard, he is a regular bucaneer of 
the old type, who values human life not one hair. Bau- 
chardy, that last doctor he took with him, was a friend 
of mine. Perhaps that is why I feel vicious about the 
man, for he killed Bauchardy as sure as I didn't.” 
“Killed him?” 



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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


"Yes; with hardship and overwork.” 

"Overwork ?” 

" Mon Dieu % yes. Dragged him through swamps after 
his infernal monkeys and tigers, and Bauchardy died in 
the hospital at Marseilles of spinal meningitis, brought 
on by the hardships of the expedition — died as mad as 
Berselius himself.” 

“As mad as Berselius?” 

“Yes; this infernal Berselius seemed to have infected 
him with his own hunting fever, and Bauchardy — 
mon Dieu , you should have seen him during his illness, 
shooting imaginary elephants, and calling for Berselius.” 

“What I want to get at is this,” said Adams. “Was 
Bauchardy driven into these swamps you speak of, and 
made to hunt against his will — treated cruelly, in fact — 
or did Berselius take his own share of the hardships?” 

“His own share! Why, from what I can understand, 
he did all the hunting. A man of iron with the ferocity 
of a tiger — a very devil, who made others follow him as 

poor Bauchardy did, to his death ” 

“Well,” said Adams, “this man interests me some- 
how, and I intend to have a look at him.” 

“The pay is good,” said Duthil, “but I have warned 
you fully, if Thenard has n’t. Good evening.” 

The Rue Dijon, where Adams lived, was a good way 
from the Beaujon. He made his way there on foot, study- 
ing the proposition as he went. 

The sporting nature of the proposal coming from the 
sedate TJlenard rather tickled him. 

“He wants to pit me against this Berselius,” said Adams 






DR, DUTHIL 


17 

to himself, “same as if we were dogs. That ’s the long 
and short of it. Yes, I can understand his meaning in 
part; he ’s afraid if Berselius engages some week-kneed 
individual, he ’ll give the weak-kneed individual more 
than he can take. He wants to stick a six-foot Yankee 
in the breach, instead of a five-foot froggie, all absinthe and 
cigarette ends. Well, he was frank, at all events. Hum, 
I don’t like the proposition — and yet there ’s something 
— there’s something — there’s something about it I do 
like. Then there ’s the two thousand francs a month, and 
not a penny out of pocket, and there ’s the Congo, and 
the guggly-wuggh alligators, and the great big hairy apes, 
and the feel of a gun in one’s hand again. Oh, my!” 

“All the same, it ’s funny,” he went on, as he drew 
near the Boulevard St. Michel. “When Thenard spoke 
of Berselius there was something more than absence ol 
friendship in his tone. Can old man Thenard have a 
down on this Berselius and does he in his heart of hearts 
imagine that by allotting P. Quincy Adams to the post 
of physician extraordinary to the expedition, he will get 
even with the Captain? My friend, remember that hymn 
the English Salvationists were yelling last Sunday outside 
the American Presbyterian Church in the Rue de Berry — 
‘Christian, walk carefully, danger is near.’ Not a bad 
motto for Paris, and I will take it.” 

He walked into the Cafe d 9 Italic , which, as everyone 
knows, is next to Mouton’s, the pork shop, on the left- 
hand side of the Boul’ Miche, as you go from the Seine; 
called for a boc, and then plunged into a game of dom- 
inoes with an art student in a magenta necktie, whom he 



18 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


had never met before, and whom, after the game, he would, 
a million to one, never meet again. 

That night, when he had blown out his candle, he 
reviewed Thenard’s proposition in the dark. The more 
he looked at it the more attraction it had for him, and — 
“Whatever comes of it,” said he to himself, “I will £o 
and see this Captain Berselius to-morrow. The animal 
seems worth the trouble of inspection.” 



CHAPTER III 


CAPTAIN BERSELIUS 

N EXT morning was chill and a white Seine mist 
wrapped Paris in its folds. It clung to the trees 
of the Avenue Champs Elvsees, and it half veiled 
the Avenue Malakoff as Adams's fiacre turned into that 
thoroughfare and drew up at No. 14, a house with 
a carriage-drive, a porter’s lodge, and wrought-iron gates. 

The American paid off his cab, rang at the porter’s 
lodge, was instantly admitted, and found himself in an 
enormous courtyard domed in with glass. He noted 
the orange and aloe trees growing in tubs of porcelain, 
as the porter led him to the big double glass doors giving 
entrance to the house. 

“He’s got the money,” thought Adams, as the glass 
swing-door was opened by a flunkey as magnificent as 
a Lord Mayor’s footman, who took the visitor’s card and 
the card of M. Thenard and presented them to a function- 
ary with a large pale face, who was seated at a table close 
to the door, 

This personage, who was as soberly dressed as an arch- 
bishop, and had altogether a pontifical air, raised him- 
self to his feet and approached the visitor. 

“Has monsieur an appointment ” 

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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


“No,” said Adams. “I have come to see your master 
on business. You can take him my card — yes, that 
one — Dr. Adams, introduced by Dr. Thenard.” 

The functionary seemed perplexed; the early hour, 
the size of the visitor, his decided manner, all taken 
together, were out of routine. Only for a moment he 
hesitated, then leading the way across the warm and 
flower-scented hall, he opened a door and said, “Will 
monsieur take a seat?” Adams entered a big room, half 
library half museum; the door closed behind him, and 
he found himself alone. 

The four walls of the room showed a few books, bu 
were mostly covered with arms and trophies of the chase. 
Japanese swords in solid ivory scabbards, swords of the 
old Samurai so keen that a touch of the edge would 
divide suspended hair. Malay krisses, double-handed 
Chinese execution swords; old pepper-pot revolvers, such 
as may still be found on the African coast; knob-kerries, 
assegais, steel-spiked balls swinging from whips of raw 
hide; weapons wild and savage and primitive as those 
with which Attila drove before him the hordes of the 
Huns, and modern weapons of to-day and yesterday; the 
big elephant gun which has been supplanted by the express 
rifle; the deadly magazine rifle, the latest products of 
Schaunard of the Rue de la Paix and Westley Richards 
of London. 

Adams forgot time as he stood examining these things; 
then he turned his attention to the trophies, mounted by 
Borchard of Berlin, that prince of taxidermists. Here 
stood a great ape, six feet and over — monstrum horrendum 



CAPTAIN BERSELIUS 


£1 


— head flung back, mouth open, shouting aloud to the 
imagination of the gazer in the language that was spoken 
ere the earliest man lifted his face to the chill mystery of 
the stars. In the right fist was clutched the branch 
of a M’bina tree, ready lifted to dash your brains 
out — the whole thing a miracle of the taxidermist’s 
art. Here crawled an alligator on a slab of granitic 
rock; an ? alligator — that is to say the despair of the 
taxidermist — for you can make nothing out of an alli- 
gator; alive and not in motion he looks stuffed, stuffed, 
he looks just the same. Hartbeest, reedbuck, the 
maned and huge-eared roan antelope, gazelle, and bush- 
buck, all were here, skull or mask, dominated by the 
vast head of the wildebeest, with ponderous sickle- 
curved horns. 

Adams had half completed the tour of the walls when 
the door of the library opened and Captain Berselius came 
in. Tal 1 , black-bearded and ferocious looking — that 
was the description of man Adams was prepared to m^et. 
But Captain Berselius was a little man in a frock-coat, 
rath?r worn, and slippers. He had evidently been in 
neglige and, to meet the visitor, slipped into the frock- 
coat, or possibly he was careless, taken up with abstrac- 
tions, dreams, business affairs, plans. He was rather 
stout, with an oval, egg-shaped face; his beard, sparse 
and pointed and tinged with gray, had originally been light 
of hue; he had pale-blue eyes, and he had a perpetual 
smile. 

It is to be understood by this that Captain Berselius’s 
smile was, so to speak, hung on a hair-trigger; there was 


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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


82 

always a trace of it on hjs face round the lips, and in con- 
versation it became accentuated. 

At first sight, during your first moments of meeting 
with Captain Berselius, you would have said, “What 
a happy-faced and jolly little man!” 

Adams, completely taken aback by the apparition 
before him, bowed. 

*T have the pleasure of speaking to Dy. Adams, intro- 
duced by Dr. Thenard ?” said Captain Berselius, motion- 
ing the visitor to a chair. “Pray take a seat, take a seat 

— - yes ” He took a seat opposite the American, 

crossed his legs in a comfortable manner, caressed his 
chin, and whilst chatting on general subjects stared full 
at the newcomer, as though Adams had been a statue, 
examining him, without the least insolence, but in that 
thorough manner with which a purchaser examines the 
horse he is about to buy or the physician of an insurance 
company a proposer. 

It was now that Adams felt he had to deal with no com- 
mon man in Captain Berselius. 

Never before had he conversed with a person so calmly 
authoritative, so perfectly at ease, and so commanding. 
This little commonplace looking, negligently dressed man, 
talking easily in his armchair, made the spacious Adams 
feel small and of little account in the world. Captain 
Berselius filled all the space. He was the person in that 
room; Adams, though he had personality enough, was 
nowhere, And now he noticed that the perpetual smile 
of the Captain had no relation to mirth or kindliness, it 
was not worn as a mask, for Captain Berselius had no 





















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CAPTAIN BERSELIUi 


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need for masks; it was a mysterious and unaccountable 
thing that was there. 

“You know M. Thenard intimately?” said Captain 
Berselius, turning suddenly from some remarks he was 
making on the United States. 

“Oh, no,” said Adams. “I have attended Jiis clinics; 
beyond that ” 

“Just so,” said the other. “Are you a good shot?” 

“Fair, with the rifle,” 

”You have had to do with big game?” 

“I have shot bear.” 

“These are some of mv trophies,” said the Captain, 
rising to his feet. He took his stand before the great ape 
and contemplated it for a moment. “I shot him near 
M’Bassa on the West Coast two years ago. The natives 
at the village where we were camping said there was a big 
monkey in a tree near by. They seemed very much 
frightened* but they led me to the tree. He knew what 
a gun was; he knew what a man was, too. He knew 
that his hour of death had arrived, and he came roaring 
out of the tree to meet me. But when he was on the 
ground, with the muzzle of my Mannlicher two yards from 
his head, all his rage vanished. He saw death, and to 
shut out the sight he put his big hands before his face ” 

“And you ?” 

“I shot him through the heart. This room does not 
represent all my work. The billiard room and the hall 
contain many of my trophies; they are interesting to me, 
for each has a history. That tiger skin there in front of 
the fireplace once covered a thing very much alive. He 













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yjvas a full-sized brute, and I met him in a rice field near 
JBenares. I had not even time to raise my gun when he 
♦ charged. Then I was on my back and he was on top of 
me. He had overshot the mark a bit — I was not even 
sscratched. I lay looking; up at his whiskers; jthey seemed 
(thick as quills, and I counted them. I was dead to all 
; intents and purposes, so I felt no fear. That \yas the 
[lesson this gentleman taught me; it is as natuygl to he 
dead as tP he aliye. I have never been afraid of 
.cjcath siij^e. Well, something .must have distracted his 
i{ attention ;J and frightened him, for he lifted himself, 
Passed over nae like a cloud, and was gone. Well, 
4Sp much for the tiger. And no>v for business. Are 
.you prepared to ^act as medical attendant to my new 
^expedition ?” 

“Well/’ said Adams, “I would .like a little time to 
< consider — — 99 0 

“Certainly,” said Captain Berselius, taking out his 
watch. “I will give you five minijtes, as a matter of form. 
Thenard, in a ijote to me this morning, informs me he has 
given you all details as to salary.” 

“Yes, he gave me the details. As you give me so 
short a time to make my decision about you, I suppose 
you have already made your decision about me?” 

“Absolutely,” said Berselius. “Two minutes have 
passed. Why waste the other three? For you have 
already made up your mind to come.” 

Adams sat down in a chair for a moment, and in that 
moment he did a great deal of thinking. 

He had never met a man before- at all like Berselius. 


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CAPTAIN BERESLIUS 


25 


He had never before come across a man with such a tre- 
mendous personality. Berselius fascinated yet repelled 
him. That there was evil in this man he felt, but he felt 
also that there was good. Much evil and much good. 
And beyond this he divined an animal ferocity latent — 
the ferocity of a tiger — a cold and pitiless and utterly 
divorced from reason ferociousness, the passion of a 
primitive man, who had never known law except the 
law of the axe wielded by the strongest. And yet there 
was something in the man that he liked. He knew by 
Berselius’s manner that if he did not take the offer now, he 
would lose it. He reckoned with lightning swiftness that 
the expedition would bring him in solid cash enough to 
start in a small way in the States, He was as poor as Job, 
as hungry for adventure as a schoolboy, and he only had 
a moment to decide in. 

“How many men are making up your party?” sud- 
denly asked Adams. 

“You and I alone,” replied Berselius, putting his watch 
in his pocket to indicate that the time was almost expired. 

“I will come,” said Adams, and it seemed to him that 
he said the words against his will. 

Captain Berselius went to a writing table, took a sheet 
of paper and wrote carefully and with consideration for the 
space of some five minutes. Then he handed the paper 
to Adams. “These are the things you want,” said he. 
“I am an old campaigner in the wilds, so you will excuse 
me for specifying them. Go for your outfit where you 
will, but for your guns to Schaunard, for he is the best. 
Order all accounts to be sent in to my secretary, M* 





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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


Pinehon. He will settle them. Your salary you can 
take how you will. If it is useful to you, I can give you a 
cheque now on the Credit Lyonnais, if you will state the 
amount/' 

“Thank you, thank you,” said Adams. “I have 
quite sufficient money for my needs, and, if it is the same 
to you, I would rather pay for my outfit myself.” 

“As you please,” said Captain Berselius, quite indif- 
ferently. “But Schaunard’s account and the account 
for drugs and instruments you will please send to M. 
Pinehon; they are part of the expedition. And now,” 
looking at his watch, ‘‘will you do me the pleasure of 
staying to dejeuner ?” 

Adams bowed. 

“I will notify you to-night at your address the exact 
date we start,” said Captain Berselius as he led 
the wav from the room. “It will be within a fort- 
night. My yacht is lying at Marseilles, and will take 
us to Matadi, which will be our base. She will be 
faster than the mail-boats and very much more com- 
fortable.” 

They crossed the hall. Captain Berselius opened a door, 
motioned his companion to enter, and Adams found 
himself in a room, half morning room, half boudoir. A 
bright log fire was burning, and on either side of the fire- 
place two women — a girl of about eighteen and a woman 
of thirty-five or so — were seated. 

The elder woman, Madame Berselius, a Parisienne, 
pale, stout, yet well-proportioned, with almond-shaped 
eyes; full lips exquisitely cut in the form of the true cupid’s 



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CAPTAIN BERSELIUS 


27 


bow; and with a face vigorous enough, but veiled by an 
expression at once mulish, blindish, and indolent — was 
a type. 

The type of the poodle woman, the parasite. With the 
insolent expression of a Japanese lady of rank, an insult 
herself to the human race, you will see her everywhere in 
the highest social ranks of society. At the Zoological 
Gardens of Madrid on a Sunday, when the grandees 
of Spain take their pleasure amidst the animals at Long*, 
champs, in Rotten Row, Washington Square, Unter den 
Linden, wherever money is, growing like an evil fungus,, 
she flourishes. 

Opposite Madaiqe Berselius sat her daughter, Maxine, 

Adams, after his first glance at the two women, saw 
only Maxine. 

Maxine had golden-brown hair, worn after the fashion 
of Cleo de Merode’s, gray eves, and a wide mouth, with 
pomegranate-red lips. Goethe’s dictum that the highest 
beauty is unobtainable without something of disproportion 
was exemplified in the case of Maxine Berselius. “Her 
mouth is too wide,” said the women, who, knowing noth- 
ing of the philosophy of art, hit upon the defect that was 
Maxine’s main charm. 

Berselius introduced Adams to his wife and daughter, 
and scarcely had he done so than a servant, in the blue- 
and-gold livery of the house, flung open the door and 
announced that dejeuner was served. 

Adams scarcely noticed the room into which they 
passed; a room whose scheme of colour was that watery 
green which we associate with the scenery of early spring. 








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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


the call of the cuckoo, and the river echoes where the weir 
foams and the willow droops. 

The tapestry hanging upon the walls did not distract 
from this scheme. Taken from some chateau of Provence, 
and old almost as the story of Nicolete, it showed ladies 
listening to shepherds who played on flutes, capering 
lambs, daffodils blowing to the winds of early spring under 
a sky gray and broken by rifts of blue. 

Adams scarcely noticed the room, or the tapestry, or 
the food placed before him; he was entirely absorbed 
by two things, Maxine and Captain Berselius. 

Berselius’s presence at the table evidently cast silence 
and a cloak of restraint upon the women. You could 
see that the servants who served him dreaded him to the 
very tips of their fingers, and, though he was chatting 
easily and in an almost paternal manner, his wife and 
daughter had almost the air of children, nervous, and 
on their very best behaviour. This was noticeable, 
especially, in Madame Berselius. The beautiful, indo- 
lent, arrogant face became a very humble face indeed 
when she turned it on the man who was evidently, literally, 
her lord and master. Maxine, though oppressed by the 
presence, wore a different air; she seemed abstracted 
and utterly unconscious of what a beautiful picture she 
made against the old-world tapestry of spring. 

Her eyes sometimes met the American’s. They scarcely 
spoke to each other once during the meal, yet their eyes 
met almost as frequently as though they had been con- 
versing. As a matter of fact, Adams was a new type of 
man to her, and on that account interesting; very different 
































































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CAPTAIN BEBSELIUS 


29 


was this son of Anak, with the restful, forceful face, to the 
curled and scented dandies of the Chaussee d’Antin, the 
“captains with the little moustaches, ” the frequenters 
of the foyer de Ballet , the cigarette-dried mummies of 
the Grand Club. It was like the view of a mountain to 
a person who had only known hills. 

Maxine, in her turn, was a new type of woman to 
Adams. This perfect flower from the Parisian hot-house 
was the rarest and most beautiful thing he had met in the 
way of womanhood. She seemed to him a rose only just 
ijnfolded, unconscious of its own freshnesg and beauty 
as of the dew upon its petals, and saying to the world, bv 
the voice of its own loveliness, “Behold me!” 

# i 

“Well/! said Captain Berselius, as he took leave of 
his guest in the smoking room, “I will let you know 
to-night the day and hour of our departure. All my 
business in Paris will be settled this afternoon. You had 
better come and see me the day before we start, so that 
we can make our last arrangements. Au revoir .” 












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CHAPTER IV 


SCHAUNARD 

X HE young man turned down the Avenue Malakoff., 
after he had left Berselius’s house, in the direction 
of the Avenue des Champs Elysees. 

In twenty-four hours a complete change had taken 
place in his life. His line of travel had taken a new 
and most unexpected course; it was as though a train 
on the North German had, suddenly, by some mysterious 
arrangement of points and tracks, found itself on the 
Paris-Lvons and Mediterranean Railway. 

Yesterday afternoon the prospect before him, though 
vague enough, was American. A practice in some big 
central American town. It would be a hard fight, for 
money was scanty, and in medicine, especially in the 
States, advertisement counts for very much. 

All that was changed now, and the hard, definite 
prospect that had elbowed itself out of vagueness stood 
before him: Africa, its palms and poisonous forests, the 
Congo — Berselius. 

Something else besides these things also stood before 
him very definitely and almost casting them into shade. 
Maxine. 

Up to this, a woman had never stood before him as a 


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SCHAUMARD 


31 


possible part of his future, if we except Mary Eliza Sum- 
mers, the eleven-year-old daughter of old Abe Summers, 
who kept the store in Dodgeville, Vermont, years ago — 
that is to say, when Paul Quincy Adams was twelve, an 
orchard-robbing hooligan, whose chief worry in life was 
that, though he could thrash his eldest brother left-handed, 
he was condemned by the law of entail to wear his old 
pants. 

When a man falls in love with a woman — really in 
love — though the attainment of his desire be all but 
impossible, he has reached the goal of life; no tide can 
take him higher toward the Absolute. He has reached 
life’s zenith, and never will he rise higher, even though 
he live to wield a sceptre or rule armies. 

Adams reached the Place de la Concorde on foot, 
walking and taking his way mechanically, and utterly 
unconscious of the passers-by. 

He was studying in minute detail Maxine Berselius, 
the pose of her head outlined against the tapestry, the 
curves of her lips that could speak so well without speak- 
ing, the little shell-like ears, the brown-gold coils of her 
hair, her hands, her dress. 

He was standing undetermined as to his route, and 
whether he would cross over to the Rue St. Honore or 
turn toward the Seine, when someone gripped his arm 
from behind, and, turning, he found himself face to face 
with Dr. Stenhouse, an English physician who had set 
up in Paris, practising in the Boulevard Haussmann and 
flourishing exceedingly. 

‘‘Well, this is luck,” said Stenhouse. 44 1 lost your 


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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


02 

^address, or I would have written, asking you to come 
and see us. I remembered it was over on the other side 
pf the water somewhere, but where exactly I could not 
remember. What are you doing with yourself ?” 

“Nothing, just a present.” 

“ Well, see here, I’m going to the Rue du Mont Thabor 
to see a patient; walk along with me — it ’s quite close, 
just behind the Rue St. Honore.” 

They crossed the Place de la Concorde. 

“You have finished your post-graduate work, I expect,” 
gaid Stenhouse. “Are you going to practise in the 
States ?” 

“Ultimately, I may,” replied Adams. “I have always 
intended doing so; but I have to feel my way very cau- 
tiously, for the money market is not in a particularly 
flourishing state with me.” 

“Good heavens!” said Stenhouse, “when is it with 
a medical man, especially when he is just starting? I’ve 
been through that. See here, why don’t you start in 
Paris?” 

“Paris?” 

“Yes, this is the place to make money. You say you 
are thinking of starting in some American city; well, let 
me tell you, there are very few American cities so full of 
rich Americans as Paris.” 

“Well,” said Adams, “the idea is not a bad one, but 
just for the present I am fixed. I am going on a big- 
game shooting expedition to the Congo.” 

“As doctor?” 

“Yes, and the salary is not bad — two thousand 






















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SCHAUMARD 33 

francs a month and everything found, te ^ay nothing 
t pf the fun.” 

“And the malaria?” 

“Oh, one has to run risks.” 

“Who are you going with?” 

“A man called Berselius.” 

“Not Captain Berselius?” asked Stenhouse, stopping 
-dead. 

“Yes, Captain Berselius, of No. 14 Avenue Malakoff. 
I have just returned from having dejeuner with him.” 

Stenhouse whistled. They were in the Rue du Mont 
Thabor bv this, in front of a small cafe. 

“Well,” said Adams, “what’s wrong?” 

“Everything,” replied the other. “This is the hoixe 
where my patient lives. Wait for me, for a moment, like 
a good fellow. I shan’t detain you long, and then we can 
finish our talk, for I have something to tell you.” 

He darted into the cafe and Adams waited, watching 
the passers-by and somewhat perturbed in mind. Sten- 
house’s manner impressed him uncomfortably, for, if 
Captain Berselius had been the devil, the Englishman 
Could not have put more disfavour into his tone. And he 
(Adams) had made a compact with Captain Berselius. 

The Rue du Mont Thabor is a somewhat gloomy little 
street, and it fitted Adams’s mood as he waited, watching 
the passers-by and the small affairs of the little shops. 

At the end of five minutes Stenhouse returned. 

“Well?” said Adams. 

“I have had no luncheon yet,” replied Stenhouse. “I 
have been so rushed. Come with me to a little place 

























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34 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


I know in the Rue St. Honore, where I can get a cup of 
tea and a bun. We will talk then.” 

“Now,” said Stenhouse, when he was seated at a little 
marble-topped table with the cup of tea and the bun 
before him. “You say you have engaged yourself to go 
to the Congo with Captain Berselius.” 

“Yes. What do you know about him?” 

“That ’s just the difficulty. I can only say this,- and 
it ’s between ourselves, the man’s name is a byword for 
a brute and a devil.” 

“That’s cheerful,” said Adams. 

“Mind you,” said Stenhouse, “he is in the very best 
society. I have met him at a reception at the Elysee. 
He goes everywhere. He belongs to the best clubs; he ’s 
a persona grata at more courts than one, and an intimate 
friend of King Leopold of Belgium. His immense wealth, 
or part of it, comes from the rubber industry — motor 
tires and so forth. And he ’s mad after big game. That ’s 
his pleasure — killing. He ’s a killer. That is the best 
description of the man. The lust of blood is in him, and 
the astounding thing, to my mind, is that he is not a 
murderer. He has killed two men in duels, and they sav 
that it is a sight to see him fighting. Mind you, when I 
sav ‘murderer,’ I do not mean to imply that he is a man 
who would murder for money. Give the devil his due. 
I mean that he is quite beyond reason when aroused, and 
if you were to hit Captain Berselius in the face he would 
kill you as certain as I’ll get indigestion from that bun I 
have just swallowed. The last doctor he took with him 
to Africa died at Marseilles from the hardships he went 



SCHAUMARD 


.3 5 

through — not at the hands of Berselius, for that would 
have aroused inquiry, but simply from the hardships of 
the expedition; but he gave frightful accounts to the 
hospital authorities of the way this Berselius had treated 
the natives. He drove that expedition right away from 
Libreville, in the French Congo, to Cod knows where. 
He had it under martial law the whole time, clubbing 
and thrashing the niggers at the least offence, and 
shooting with his own hand two of them who tried to 
desert.” 

“You must remember,” said Adams, taking up the 
cudgels for Berselius and almost surprised himself at so 
doing, “that an expedition like that, if it is not held together 
by a firm hand, goes to pieces, and the result is disaster for 
everyone. And you know what niggers are.” 

“There you are,” laughed Stenhouse. “The man has 
obsessed you already, and you'll come back, if you go, like 
Bauchardy, the man who died in the hospital at Marseilles, 
cursing Barselius, vet so magnetized by the power of the 
chap that you would be ready to follow him again if he 
said ‘Come/ and you had the legs to stand on. That 
is how Bauchardy was.” 

“The man, undoubtedly, has a great individuality,” 
said Adams. “Passing him in the street one might take 
him for a very ordinary person. Meeting him for the first 
time, he looks all good nature; that smile ” 

“Always,” said Stenhouse. “Beware of a man with 
a perpetual smile on his face.” ’ 

“Yes, I know that, but this smile of Berselius’s is not 
worn as a cloak. It seems quite natural to the man, yet 



$6 


THE FOOTS OF SLUENCE 


.somehow bad, as if it came from a profound and natural 
<cynicism directed against all things — including all 
^things good.” 

“You have put it,” said Stenhouse, “in four words.” 

“But, in spite of everything,” said Adams, “I believe 
man to have great good qualities: some instinct tells 
^ipe so.” 

“My dear sir,” said SteiibOTSQ, “did you ever meet a 
fojid man worth twopence at his trade who had not good 
/qualities ? The bad man who is half good — so to speak 
— is a much more dangerous villain than the barrier 
^bully without heart or soul. When hell makes a super- 
cexcellent devil, the devil puts goodness in just as a baker 
puts soda in his bread to make it rise. Look at Verlaine.” 

“Well,” said Adams, “I have promised Berselius, 
and I will have to go. Besides, there are other 
considerations . ’ ’ 

He was thinking of Maxine, and a smile lit up his face. 

“You seem happy enough about it,” said Stenhouse, 
rising to go. “Well, ‘he who will to Cupar maun to 
Cupar/ When do you start?” 

“I don’t know yet, but I shall hear to-night.” 

They passed out into the Rue St. Honore, where they 
parted . 

“Good luck,” said Stenhouse, getting into a fiacre. 

“Good-bye,” replied Adams, waving his hand. 

Being in that quarter of the town, and having nothing 
especial to do, he determined to go to Schaunard’s in the 
Rue de la Paix, and see about his guns. 

Schaunard personally superintends his own shop, 


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SCHAUMERD 


37 


which is the first gun-shop on the Continent of Europe. 
Emperors visit him in person and he receives them as an 
equal, though far superior to them in the science of sport. 
An old man now, with a long white beard, he remembers 
the fowling-pieces and rifles which he supplied to the 
Emperor Maximilian before that unfortunate gentleman 
started on his fatal expedition in search of a throne. He 
is a mathematician as well as a maker of guns; his teles- 
copic sights and wind gauges are second to none in the 
world, and his shop front in the Rue de la Paix exposes no 
wares — it has just a wire blind, on which are blazoned 
the arms of Russia, England, and Spain. 

But, inside, the place is a joy to a rightly constituted 
man. Behind glass cases the long processsions of guns 
and rifles, smooth, sleek, nut-brown and deadly, are a 
sight for the eves of a sportsman. 

The duelling pistol is still a factor in Continental 
life, and the cases containing them at Schaunard’s are 
worth lingering over for the modern duelling pistol is 
a thing of beauty, very different from the murderous hair- 
trigger machines of Count Considine — though just as 
deadly. 

To Schaunard, pottering amongst his wares, appeared 
Adams. 

The swing-door closed, shutting out the sound of the 
Rile de la Paix, and the old gun-merchant came forward 
through the silence of his shop to meet his visitor. 

Adams explained his business. He had come to buy 
some rifles for a big-game expedition. Captain Berselius 
had recommended him. 















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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


88 

“Ah! CaptVm Berselius ?” said Schaunard, and an 
interested look came into his face. “True, he is a cus- 
tomer of mine. As a matter of fact, his guns for his new 
expedition are already boxed and directed for Marseilles, 
Ah, yes — you require a complete outfit, I suppose ?” 

“Yes,” said Adams. “I am going with him/’ 

“ Going with Captain Berselius as a friend?” 

‘‘No, as a doctor/’ 

“True, he generally takes a doctor with him,” said 
Schaunard, running his fingers through his beard. “Have 
you had much experiece amidst big game, and can you 
make out your own list of requirements, or shall I help 
you with my advice?” 

“I should be very glad of your advice — No, I have 
not had much experience in big-game shooting. I have 
shot bears, that ’s all ” 

“Armand!” cried Schaunard, and a pale-faced young 
man came forward from the back part of the shop. 

“Open me this case.” 

Armand opened a case, and the deft hand of the old 
man took down a double-barrelled cordite rifle, light- 
looking and of exquisite workmanship. 

“These are the guns we shoot elephants with nowa- 
days,’'' said Schaunard, handling the weapon lovingly. 
“A child could carry it, and there is nothing living it will 
not kill. He laughed softly to himself, and then directed 
Armand to bring forward an elephant gun of the old pat- 
tern. In an instant the young man returned, staggering 
under the weight of the immense rifle, shod with a heel 
of india rubber an inch thick. 
















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SCHAUMARD 


:S9 


Adams laughed,, took the thing up with one hand, 
and raised it to his shoulder as though it had been a 
featherweight. 

“Ah!” said he, “here’s a gun worth shooting with. 

Sehaunard looked on with admiration at the giant 
handling the gigantic gun. 

“Oh. for you,” said he., “it ’s all very well. Ma foi % , 
but you suit one another, you both are of another day.” 

“God bless you/’ said Adams, “you can pick me up 
by the bushel in the States. I ’m small. Say., how much 
is this thing?” 

“That!” cried Sehaunard. “Why, what on earth, 
could you want with such an obsolete weapon as that?” 

“Tell me — does this thing hit harder, gun for gun — 
not weight for weight, mind you — but gun for gun — than 
that double-barrel you are holding in your hands?” 

“Oh, yes,” said Sehaunard, “it hits harder, just as 
a cannon would hit harder, but ” 

“I ’ll have her,” said Adams. “I’ve taken a fancy 
to her. See here. Captain Berselius is paying for mv 
guns; they are his, part of the expedition — I want this 
as my own, and I ’ll pay you for her out of my own pocket. 
How much is she?” 

Sehaunard, whose fifty years of trading had explained 
to him the fact that when an American takes a whim into 
his head it is best for all parties to let him have his own 
way, ran his fingers through his beard. 

“The thing has no price,” said he. “It is a curiosity. 
But if you must have it — well, I will let you have it for two 
hundred francs.” 








































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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


“Done,” said Adams. “Have you any cartridges ?” 

“Oh, yes,” replied Schaunard. “Heaps. That is 
to say, I have the old cartridges, and I can have a couple 
gf hundred of them emptied and re-filled and percus- 
sioned. Ah, well, monsieur, you must have your own 
wav. Arm and, take the gun; have it attended to and 
packed. And now that monsieur has his play-toy, 
finished the old man, with one of his silent little laughs, 
H let us come to business.” 

They did, and nearly an hour was spent whilst the 
American chose a double hammerless-ejector cordite 
rifle and a .256 sporting Mannlicher, for Schaunard was 
a man who, when he took an interest in a customer, could 
be very interesting. 

When business was concluded Schaunard gave his 
customer various tips as to the treatment of guns. “And 
now,” said he, opening the door as Adams was taking his 
departure, “I will give you one more piece of advice 
about this expedition. It is a piece of private advice* 
arid I will trust you not to tell the Captain that I gave 
it to you.” 

“Yes. What is the advice ?” 

“Don’t go.” 

Adams laughed as he turned on his heel, and Schaunard 
laughed as he closed the door. 

A passer-by might have imagined that the two men had 
just exchanged a good joke. 

Before Adams had taken three steps, the door of the 
shop re-opened, and Schaunard ’s voice called again. 

“Monsieur.” 



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SCHAUMARD 


41 


“Yes?” said Adams, turning. 

“You need not pay me for the gun till you come back.” 
“Right,” said Adams, laughing. “I will call in and 
pay you for it when I come back. Au revoir .” 
“Adieu.” 









































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CHAPTER V 


MARSEILLES 

O N THE day of departure Berselius was entertained 
at dejeuner by the Cercle Militaire. He brought 
Adams with him as a guest. 

Nearly all the sporting members of the great club 
were present to speed the man who after Schillings was 
reckoned on the Continent the most adventurous big- 
game hunter in the world. 

Despite what Stenhouse, Duthil, and Schaunard had 
said, Adams by this time inclined to a half-liking for 
Berseliirs; the man seemed so far from and unconscious 
erf the little things of the world, so destitute of pettiness , 
that the half liking which always accompanies respect 
could not but find a place in Adams’s mind. 

Guest at a table surrounded by sixty of the wealthiest 
and most powerful officers of a military nation, Berselius 
did not forget his companion, but introduced him with 
painstaking care to the chief men present, included him 
in his speech of thanks, and made him feel that though 
he was taking Berselius’s pay, he was his friend and on a 
perfect social equality with him. 

Adams felt this keenly. On qualifying first he had 
obtained an appointment as travelling physician to an 
42 








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43 


American, a prominent member of the New York smart 
s§t, a man of twentv-two, a motorist, a yachtsman, clean 
§haved as an actor and smug as a butler, one of those men 
who make the great American nation so small in the eyes 
of the world — the world that cannot see beyond the 
servants’ hall antics of New York society to the great plains 
where the Adamses hew the wood and draw the water, build 
the cities and bridge the rivers, and lay the iron roads, 
making rail-h$ads *of the roar of the Atlantic and the 
thunder of the Pacific. 

This gentleman treated Adams as a paid attendant and 
in such a manner that Adams one morning lifted him from 
his bed by the slack of his silk pajamas and all but drowned 
him in his own bath. 

He could not but remember the incident as he sat 
watching Berselius so calm, so courtly, so absolutely 
destitute of mannerism, so incontestably the superior, 
in some magnetic way, of all the other men who were 
present. 

Maxine and M. Pinchon, the secretary, were to accom- 
pany them to Marseilles. 

A cold* white Paris fog covered the city that night as 
they drove to the station, and the fog detonators and 
horns followed them as they glided out slowly from 
beneath the great glass roof. Slowly at first, then more 
swiftly over rumbling bridges and clicking point, more 
swiftly still, breaking from the fog-banked Seine valley, 
through snarling tunnel and chattering cutting, faster 
now and freer, by long lines of poplar trees, mist- 
atrewn, and moonlit ponds and fields, spectral whit^ 








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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


roads, little winking towns; and now, as if drawn by 
the magnetic south, swaying to the rock-a-bye of speed, 
aiming for the lights of Dijon far away south, to the 
tune of the wheels, “ seventy-miles-an-hour — seventy- 
miles-an-hour.” 

Civilization, whatever else she has done, has written 
one poem, the “Rapide.” True to herself, she makes 
it pay a dividend, and prostitutes it to the service of 
stockbrokers. Society folk, and gamblers bound for 
Monaco — but what a poem it is that we snore through 
between a day in Paris and a day in Marseilles. A poem, 
swiftly moving, musical with speed, a song built up of 
songs, telling of Paris, its chill and winter fog, of the 
winter fields, the poplar trees and mist; vineyards of the 
Cote d’Or; Provence with the dawn upon it, Tarascon 
blowing its morning bugle to the sun; the Rhone, and 
the vineyards, and the olives, and the white, white roads; 
ending at last in that triumphant blast of music, light and 
colour, Marseilles 

La Joconde , Berselius’s yacht, was berthed at the Mes- 
sagerie wharf, and after dejeuner at the Hotel Noailles, 
they took their way there on foot. 

Adams had never seen the south before as Marseilles 
shows it. The vivid light and the black shadows, the 
variegated crowd of the Canabier Prolongue had for him 
an “Arabian Nights’ ” fascination, but the wharves held 
a deeper fascination still. 

Marseilles draws its most subtle charm from far away 
in the past. Beaked triremes have rubbed their girding 
cables against the wharves of the old Phocee; the sun- 











































































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MARSEILLES 


45 


shine of a thousand years has left some trace of its gold, 
a mirage in the air chilled by the mistral and perfumed 
by the ocean. 

At Marseilles took place the meeting between Mary 
Magdalen and Laeta Acilia, so delightfully fabled by 
Anatole France. The Count of Monte Cristo landed 
here after he had discovered his treasure, and here Cade- 
rouse after the infamy at “La Reserve” watched old Dantes 
Starving to death. Multitudes of ships, fabled and real, 
jhave passed from the harbour to countries curious and 
strange, but never one of them to a stranger country than 
that to which La Joconde was to bear Berselius and his 
companion. 

Gay as Naples with colour, piercing the blue skv 
with a thousand spars, fluttering the flags of a'l nations 
to the wind, shot through with the sharp rattle of winch- 
chains, and perfumed with garlic, vanilla, fumes of coal 
tar, and the tang of the sea, the wharves of Marseilles lay 
before the travellers, a great counter eternally Vibrating 
to the thunder of trade; bales of carpets from the Levant, 
tons of cheeses from Holland, wood from Norway, copra, 
rice, tobacco, corn, silks from China and Japan, cotton 
from Lancashire; all pouring into the tune of the winch- 
pauls, the cry of the stevedores, and the bugles of Port 
Saint Jean, shrill beneath the blue skv and triumphant 
as the crowing of the Gallic cock. 

Between the breaks in the shipping one could see the 
sea-gulls fishing and the harbour flashing, here spangled 
with coal tar, here whipped to deepest sapphire by the 
mistral; the junk shops, grog shops, parrot shops, rope- 


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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


walks, ships’ stores and factories lining the quays, each 
lending a perfume, a voice, or a scrap of colour to the air 
vibrating with light, vibrating with sound, shot through 
with voices; hammer blows from the copper sheathers 
in the dry docks, the rolling of drums from Port St. Nicho- 
las, the roaring of grain elevators, rattling of winch-chains, 
trumpeting of ship sirens, mewing of gulls, the bells of 
Notre Dame and the bells of St. Victor, all fused, orches- 
trated, into one triumphant symphony beneath the clear 
blue sky and the trade flags of the world. 

La Joconde was berthed beside a Messagerie boat which 
they had to cross to reach her. 

She was a palatial cruising yacht of twelve hundred 
tons’ burden, built somewhat on the lines of Drexehs 
La Margharita , but with less width of funnel. 

It was two o’clock in the afternoon when they went on 
board; all the luggage had arrived, steam was up, the port 
arrangements had been made, and Berselius determined 
to start at once. 

Maxine kissed him, then she turned to Adams. 

“ Bon voyage 

“Good-bye,” said Adams. 

He held her hand for a fraction of a second after his 
grasp had relaxed. 

Then she was standing on the deck of the Messagerie 
boat, waving good-bye across the lane of blue water 
widening between La Joconde and her berth mate. 

At the harbour mouth, looking back across the blue 
wind-swept water, he fancied he could still see her, a 
microscopic speck in the great picture of terraced 


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MARSEILLES 47 

Marseilles, with its windows, houses, flags, and domes 
glittering and burning in the sun. 

Then the swell of the Gulf of Lyons took La Joconde 
as a nurse takes an infant and rocks it on her knee, and 
France and civilization were slowly wrapped from sight 
under the veils of distance. 


PART TWO 







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CHAPTER VI 


MATADI 

fl T WAS evening. La Joconde , Berselius’s yacht, lay 
* moored at the wharf of Matadi; warpling against 
H the starboard plates, whimpering, wimpling, 
here smooth as glass, here eddied and frosted, a sea of 
golden light, a gliding mirror, went the Congo. 

A faint, faint haze dulled the palms away on the other 
side; from the wharf, where ships were loading up with 
rubber, ivory, palm-oil, and bales of gum copal, the roar 
and rattle of steam-winches went across the water, far away 
across the glittering water, where the red flamingoes were 
flying, to that other shore where the palm trees showed 
their fringe of hot and hazy green. 

The impression of heat which green, the coolest of 
all colours, can produce, damp heat, heart-weakening 
heat, that is the master impression produced by the 
Congo on the mind of man. All the other impressions 
are — to paraphrase Thenard — embroideries on this. 

Yet how many other impressions there are! The 
Congo is Africa in a frank mood. Africa, laving her 
hand on her heart and speaking, or rather, whispering 
the truth. 

This great river flooding from Stanley Pool and far 
away beyond, draws with it, like a moving dream, the 


51 





THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


pictures of the roaring rapids and the silent pools, the 
swamps filled with darkness of vegetation and murderous 
life; the unutterable loneliness of vast forests. The water 
brook of the hartbeest and antelope, it brings with it their 
quiet reflections, just as it brings the awful horn and the 
pig-like face of the rhinoceros. What things have not 
slaked their thirst in this quiet water flooding past 
Matadi — and wallowed in it ? Its faint perfume 
hints at that. 

On the deck of the yacht, under the double awning, 
Berselius was seated, and, close to him, Adams. They 
had arrived only yesterday, and to-morrow they were pro- 
ceeding by rail to Leopoldville, which was to be the real 
base of the expedition, leaving La Joconde behind at 
Matadi. 

The yacht would return to France. 

“What a lot of stuff they are loading on those ships,” 
said Adams, turning in his chair as the roar and rattle of 

the winch chains, that had ceased for a moment, flared 

# 

up again like a flame of sound. “What are the exports 
here?” 

“ Gum copal — nuts — rubber — tusks — everything 
you can get out of there,” answered Berselius, lazily 
waving a hand to indicate the Congo basin. 

Adams leaning back in his deck chair, followed with 
his eyes the sweep of Berselius’s hand, “ over there,” 
little did he dream of what those woods held in their 
magic. 

Then Berselius went below. 

The moon rose; lights speckled the misty wharf and 



MATADI 


53 


a broad road of silver lay stretched across the moving 
water to the other bank that* under the moonlight, lay 
like a line of cotton-wool. It was the mist tangled by 
and tangling the trees. 

Adams paced the deck, smoking and occasionally 
pausing to flip off his cigar-ash on the bulwark rail. He 
was thinking of Maxine Berselius. She had come to 
Marseilles to see them off, and 

Not a word had been exchanged between them that a 
third person did not hear or might not have heard, yet 
they had told each other the whole of that delightful story 
in which the hero is I and the heroine You. 

Adams on his side and Maxine on hers did not in the 
least contemplate possibilities. A social river, wide as the 
Congo, and flowing from as mysterious a source, lay be- 
tween them. Maxine was rich — so rich that the contrast of 
her wealth with his own poverty shut the door for Adams 
on the idea of marriage. He could not hope to take his 
true place in the world for years, and he would not stoop 
to take a woman’s money or assistance. 

He was too big to go through a back door. No, he 
would enter the social temple by walking between the 
pillars of the portico, or smashing an entrance way through 
the wall with his fist. 

He was a type of the true American man, the individual 
who trusts in himself; an unpleasant person very often, 
but the most essentially male creation in Nature. 

Though he could not contemplate Maxine as a wife, 
he did as a woman. In a state of savagery he would have 
carried her off in his arms; surrounded as he was by the 









































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34 

trammels of civilization, he contented himself with 
imagining her in that position. 

It is quite possible that no other woman would ever 
inspire the same passion in him. He knew this, yet he 
did not grumble; for he was practical, and his practical 
nature had a part in his wildest dreams. 

Go to New York and look at the twenty-storied, 
sky-scrapers built by the Adamses. They look like houses 
out of a story by Dean Swift. The wildest dreams of 
architecture. Yet they don’t fall down,' they serve their 
purpose, for the dreamers who built them were at bottom 
practical men. 

As he paced the deck, smoking and contemplating the 
moonlit river, Maxine gave place in his mind to her 
father. 

Berselius up to this had shown himself in no unfavour- 
able light. Up to this he had been almost companionable. 

Almost! They had dined together, paced the deck 
together, discussed all sorts of subjects, yet not by the 
fraction of an inch had he advanced in his knowledge 
of the man. A wall of ice divided Berselius from his 
fellow men. Between him and them a great gulf was 

fixed, a gulf narrow enough to speak across, but of an 

impenetrable depth. Berselius was always so assured, 
so impassively calm, so authoritative, his conversation so 
penetrative, so lit by intuition and acquired knowledge, 
that Adams sometimes in his company felt that elation 
which comes to us when we find ourselves in the 

presence of a supreme mind. At other times this 

overpowering personality weighed upon him so much 



MATADI 


55 


that he Would leave the saloon and pace the deck so 
as to become himself again. 

Next morning left by rail for Leopoldville, where 
they found waiting for them the Leopold , a shallow 
draught steamer, of some two hundred tons. 















































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YANDJALI 

T HE Leopold was officered entirely by Belgians, and 
it would have been almost impossible to find $ 
pleasanter set of men. Tilkipas, the captain, 
^especially, won Adams’s regard. He was a huge man, 
with a wife and family in Antwerp, and he was 
eternally .damning the Congo and wishing himself back 
in Antwerp. 

They transhipped to a smaller boat, the Couronne , 
and one morning shortly after breakfast three strokes 
on the steamer bell announced their approach to Yandjali. 

Imagine a rough landing-stage, a handful of houses, 
mostly mud-built, the funereal heat-green of palm and 
banana, a flood of tropical sunshine lighting the little 
wharf, crammed with bales of merchandise. 

Such was Yandjali, and beyond Yandjali lav the 
forest, and in front of Yandjali flowed the river, and 
years ago boom-boom down the river’s shining surface, 
from away up there where the great palms gave place to 
reeds and water-grass, you might have heard the sound 
of the hippopotami bellowing to the sun, a deep organ 
note, unlike the sound emitted by any other creature 
on earth. 


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YANDJAU 


57 


You do not hear it now. The great brutes have 
long ago been driven away by man. 

On the wharf to greet the steamer stood the District 
Commissioner, Commander Verhaeren; behind him six 
or seven half-naked savage-looking blacks, each topped 
with a red fez and armed with an Albini rifle, stood 
gazing straight before them with wrinkled eyes at the 
approaching boat. 

Verhaeren and Berselius were seemingly old friends; 
they shook hands and Berselius introduced Adams; 
then the three left the wharf and walked up to the Dis- 
trict Commissioner’s house, a frame building surrounded 
by palm trees and some distance from the mud huts of 
the soldiers and porters. 

The Yandjali of this story, not to be confounded with 
Yandjali notorious in Congo history for its massacre, is 
not in a rubber district, though on the fringe of one; 
it is a game district and produces cassava. The Congo 
State has parcelled out its territory. There are the 
rubber districts, the gum copal districts, the food districts, 
and the districts where ivory is obtained. In each of 
these districts the natives are made to work and bring 
in rubber, gum copal, food, or ivory, as a tax. The 
District Commissioner, or Chef de Poste , in each dis- 
trict draws up a schedule of what is required. Such 
and [such a villiage must produce and hand over so 
many kilos of rubber or copal, so much cassaba, so 
many tusks, etc. 

Verhaeren was a stout, pale-faced man, with a jet- 
black beard, a good-tempered looking man, with that 




























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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


strange, lazy, semi-Oriental look which the Belgian 
face takes when the owner of it is fixed to a post, with 
nothing to do but oversee trade, and when the post is 
on the confines of civilization. 

Away up country, lost in the dim, green, heat-laden 
wilderness, you will find a different type of man; more 
alert and nervy, a man who never smiles, a preoccupied 
looking man who, ten years or five years ago, lost his 
berth in an office for misconduct, or his commission in 
the army. A declasse. He is the man who really drives 
the Congo machine, the last wheel in the engine, but the 
most important; the man whose deeds are not to be 
written. 

Verhaeren’s living room in the framehouse was fur- 
nished with steamer deck chairs, a table and some shelves. 
Pinned to the wall and curling up at the corners was a 
page torn from La Gaudriole , the picture of a girl in tights; 
on one of the shelves lay a stack of old newspapers, on 
another a stack of official papers, reports from subordi- 
nates, invoices, and those eternal “official letters,” with 
which the Congo Government deluges its employees, 
and whose everlasting purport is “Get more ivory, get 
more rubber, get more copal.” 

Verhaeren brought out some excellent cigars and a 
bottle of Vanderhum, and the three men smoked and 
talked. He had acted as Berselius’s agent for the expe- 
dition, and had collected all the gun-bearers and porters 
necessary, and a guide. It was Berselius’s intention 
to strike a hundred miles west up river almost parallel 
to the Congo, and then south into the heart of the ele- 





YANDJALI 


59 


phant country. They talked of the expedition, but Ver- 
haeren showed little knowledge of the work and no 
enthusiasm. The Belgians of the Congo have no feeling 
for sport, They never hunt the game at their doors, 
except for food. 

When they had discussed matters, Verhaeren led 
the way out for Berselius to inspect his arrangements. 

The porters were called up. There were forty of them, 
$nd Adams thought that he had never before seen such 
^ collection of depressed looking individuals; they were 
muscular ^nopghj but there was something in their faces, 
jheir movement^ and their attitude, that told a tale ox 
spirits broken to servitude by terror. 

The four gun-bearers and the headman were very 
different. The headman was a Zappo Zap, a ferocious 
looking nigger, fez-tipped, who could speak twenty words 
of French, and who was nicknamed Felix. The gun 
bearers were recruited from the “ soldiers” of the 
state by special leave from headquarters. 

Adams looked with astonishment at the immense 
amount of luggage they were bringing. “Chop boxes, ” 
such as are used on the east coast, contained stores; 
two big tents, a couple of “Roorkee” chairs, folding-beds 
and tables, cork mattresses, cooking utensils, made up 
the pile, to say nothing of the guns which had just been 
taken from their cases. 

“What did you bring this thing for?” asked Berselius, 
pointing to Adams’s elephant gun; which the Zappo Zap 
headman was just stripping from its covering. 

“To shoot with,” said Adams, laughing. 











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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


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Berselius looked at the big man handling the big gum 
and gave a short laugh. 

“Well, bring it,” said he; “but I don’t envy vour gun- 
bearers.” 

But Felix, the headman, did not seem of the same 
opinion. The enormous rifle evidently appealed to his 
ferocious heart. It was a god-gun this, and no mistake, 
and its lustre evidently spread to Adams, the owner of it, 

Felix was a very big man, almost as big as Adams; 
a member of the great cannibal fighting tribe of Zappo 
Zaps, he had followed Verhaeren, who had once held a 
post in the Bena Pianga country, to Yandjali; he had a 
sort of attachment for Verhaeren, which showed that he 
possessed some sort of heart. All the Zappo Zaps have 
been enrolled by the Congo Government as “soldiers”; 
they have a bad name and cause a lot of heart-searching 
to the Brussels administration, for when they are used in 
punitive expeditions to burn villages of recalcitrant 
rubber-getters, they, to use a local expression, “will eat 
when they have killed.” When they are used en masse , 
the old cannibal instinct breaks out; when the killing is 
over they go for the killed, furious as dogs over bones. 
God help the man who would come between them and 
their food. 

Of these men Felix was a fine specimen. A nature 
man, ever ready to slay, and cruel as Death. A man 
from the beginning of the world. 

If Felix had possessed a wife, he and she might have 
stood for the man and woman mentioned by Thenard 
in his lecture. 


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YANDJALI 


61 


The basic man and woman in whose dim brainy Deter- 
mination had begun to work, sketching the vague line on 
either side of which lies the Right and Left of moral 
action. 

A true savage, never to be really civilized. For it is 
the fate of the savage that he will never become one of us 
Do what you will and pray how you will, you will never 
make up for the million years that have passed him by, 
the million years during which the dim sketch which is 
;lhe basis of all ethics has lain in his brain undeveloped, 
dr developed only into a few fantastic and abortive God 
shapes and devil shapes. 

He will never become one of us. Extraordinary para- 
dox — he never can become a Leopold or a Felix Fuchs! 

Berselius disbanded the porters with a wave of the 
hand, and he and his companions began a round of the 
station. Verhaeren, with a cigar in his mouth led the way. 

He opened the door of a go-down, and Adams in the 
dim light, saw bale upon bale of stuff; gum copal it proved 
to be, for Yandjali tapped a huge district where this stuff 
is found, and which lies forty miles to the south. There 
was also cassava in large quantities, and the place had a 
heady smell, as if fermentation were going on amidst the 
bales. 

Verhaeren shut the door and led on till, rounding a 
corner, a puff of hot air brought a stench which caused 
Adams to choke and spit. 

Verhaeren laughed. 

It was the Hostage House that sent its poisonous 
breath to meet them. 




















































































































































































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THE POOLS OE SILENCE 


A native corporal and two soldiers stood at the palisade 
which circled the Hostage House. The women and 
♦children had just been driven back from the fields where 
they had been digging and weeding, and they had been 
served with their wretched dinners. They were eating 
.these scraps of food like animals, some in the sun amidst 
.the tufts of grass and mounds of ordure in the little yard, 
isome in the shadow of the house. 

There were old, old women like shrivelled monkeys; 
^gkrls of twelve and fifteen, some almost comely; 
middle-aged women, women about to become mothers, 
and a woman who had become a mother during the past 
night lying there in the shelter of the Hostage House. 
There were little pot-bellied nigger children, tiny black 
dots, who had to do their bit of work in the fields with 
the others; and when the strangers appeared and looked 
over the rail, these folk set up a crying and chattering, 
and ran about distractedly, not knowing what new thing 
was in store for them. They were the female folk and 
children of a village, ten miles awav south; they were 
here as “hostages,” because the village had not produced 
its full tale of cassava. They had been here over a month. 

The soldiers laughed, and struck with the butts of 
their rifles on the palisading, as if to increase the confusion. 
Adams noticed that the young girls and women were of 
all the terrified crowd seemingly the most terrified. He 
did not know the reason; he could not even guess it. A 
good man himself, and believing in a God in heaven, he 
could not guess the truth. He knew nothing of the reason 
of these women’s terror, and he looked with disgust 
































































































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YANDJALI 


63 


at the scene before him, not entirely comprehending. 
Those creatures, so filthy, so animal-like, created in his 
mind such abhorrence that he forgot to make allow- 
ances for the fact that they were penned like swine, and 
that perchance in their own native state, free in their own 
villages, they might be cleaner and less revolting. He 
could not hear the dismal cry of the “Congo niggers/' 
who of all people on the earth are the most miserable, the 
most abused, the most sorrow-stricken, the most dumb. 
He did not know that he was looking at one of the filthy 
acts in the great drama that a hundred years hence will 
be read with horror by a more enlightened world. 

They turned from the degrading sight and went back 
to Verh&eren’s house for dinner. 



CHAPTER VIII 


THE VOICE OF THE CONGO FOREST 

J UST after daybreak next morning the expedition 
started . 

Berselius, Adams, the gun-bearers and Felixheaded 
the line; a long way after came the porters and their 
loads, shepherded bv half a dozen soldiers of the state 
specially hired for the business. 

Before they had gone a mile on their route the sun 
was blazing strongly, sharp bird-calls came from the 
trees, and from the porters tramping under their loads 
a hum like the hum of an awakened beehive. These 
people will talk and chatter when the sun rises; club them, 
or threaten them, or load them with burdens as much 
as you please, the old instinct of the birds and beasts 
remains. 

At first the way led through cassava and manioc fields 
and past clumps of palms; then, all at once, and like 
plunging under a green veil or into the heart of a green 
wave, they entered the forest. 

The night chill was just leaving the forest, the great 
green gloom, festooned with fantastic rope-like ten- 
drils, was drinking the sunlight with a million tongues; 
you could hear the rustle and snap of branches straight- 

64 










































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THE VOICE OF THE CONGO FROEST 65 


<ening themselves and sighing toward heaven after the 
Jong, damp, chilly night. The tropical forest at day- 
break flings its arms up to the sun as if to embrace him, 
and all the teeming life it holds gives tongue. Flights of 
coloured and extraordinary birds rise like smoke wreaths 
from the steaming leaves, and the drone of a million, 
million insects from the sonorous depths comes like the 
sound of life in ferment. 

The river lay a few miles to their left, and faintly 
from it, muffled by the trees, they could hear the shrill 
whistling of the river steamboat. It was like the “good- 
bye,” of civilization. 

The road they were pursuing through the forest was 
just a dim track beaten down bv the feet of the copal 
and cassava gatherers bearing their loads to Yandjali. 
Here and there the forest thinned out and a riot of 
umbrella thorns, vicious sword-like grass and tall, 
dull purple flowers, like hollyhocks made a scrub that 
fhoked the way and tangled the foot; then the trees 
would thicken up, and with the green gloom of a 
mighty wave the forest would fall upon the travellers 
and swallow them up. 

Adams, tramping beside Berselius, tried vainly to 
analyze the extraordinary and new sensations to which 
this place gave birth in him. 

The forest had taken him. It seemed to him, on 
entering it, that he had died to all the things he had 
ever known. At Yandjali he had felt himself in a foreign 
country, but still in touch with Europe and the past; 
a mile deep in the forest and Yandjali itself, savage as 



66 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


it was, seemed part of the civilization and the life he had 
left behind him. 

The forests of the old world may be vast, but their trees 
are familiar. One may lose one’s direction, but one can 
never lose oneself amidst the friendly pines, the beeches, the 
oaks, whose forms have been known to us from childhood. 

But here, where the b^ard-moss hangs from unknown 
trees, as we tramp through the sweltering sap-scented 
gloom, we feel ourselves not in a forest but under a cover. 

There is nothing of the perfume of the pine, nothing 
of the breeze in the branches, nothing of the beauty of 
the forest twilight here. We are in a great green room, 
festooned with vines and tendrils and hung about with 
leaves. Nothing is beautiful here, but everything is 
curious. It is a curiosity shop, where one pays with 
the sweat of one’s brow, with the languor of one’s body, 
and the remembrance of one’s past, for the sight of an 
orchid shaped like a bird, or a flower shaped like a jug, 
or a bird whose flight is a flash of sapphire dust. 

A great green room, where echo sounds of things 
unknown. 

You can see nothing but the foliage, and the tree boles 
just around, yet the place is full of life and war and danger. 

That crash followed by the shrieking of birds — you 
cannot tell whether it is half a mile away or quite close, or 
to the right, or to the left, or whether it is caused bv a 
branch torn from a tree by some huge hand, or a tree 
a hundred years old felled at last by Time. 

Time is the woodman of the Congo forests. Nobody 
^lse could do the work, and he works in his own Ltzy 


. 

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THE VOICE OF THE CONGO FOREST 67 


fashion, leaving things to right themselves and find their 
own salvation. 

Just as there is eternal war to the death between the 
beasts of this jungle, so there is war to the death between 
the trees, the vines, and the weeds. A frightful battle 
between the vegetable things is going on; we scarcely 
recognize it, because the processes are so slow, but if 
five years of the jungle could be photographed week by 
week, and the whole series be run rapidly off on some 
huge cinematograph machine, you would see a heaving 
and rending struggle for existence, vegetation fed by the 
roaring tropical rains rising like a giant and flinging 
itself on the vegetation of yesterday; vines lengthening 
like snakes, tree felling tree, and weed choking weed. 

Even in the quietude of a moment, standing and 
looking before one at the moss-bearded trees and the 
python-like loops of the lianas, one can see the struggle 
crystallized, just as in the still marble of the Laocoon one 
sees the struggle of life with death. 

In this place which covers an unthinkable area of 
the earth, a vast population has dwelt since the begin- 
ning of time. Think of it. Shut off from the world 
which has progressed toward civilization, alone with 
the beasts and the trees, they have lived here without a 
guide and without a God. The instinct which teaches 
the birds to build nests taught them to build huts; the 
herd-instinct drove them into tribes. 

Then, ages ago, before Christ was crucified, before 
Moses was born, began the terrible and pathetic attempt 
of a predamned people to raise their heads and walk 













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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


68 

erect. The first lifting of purblind eyes destined never 
to see even the face of Art. 

Yet there was a germ of civilization amongst them. 
They had villages and vague laws and art of a sort; 
the ferocious tribes drew to one side, hunting beasts 
and warring with each other, and the others, the milder 
and kindlier tribes, led their own comparatively qui^t 
life; and Mohammed was born somewhere in the unknown 
North, and they knew nothing of the fact till the Arab 
slavers raided them, and robbed them of men and women 
and children, just as boys rob an orchard. 

But the birth of Christ and the foundation of Chris- 
tendom was the event which in far distant years was 
destined to be this unhappy people’s last undoing. 

They had known the beasts of the forests, the storms, 
the rains, the Arab raiders, but Fate had reserved a new 
thing for them to know. The Christians. Alas, that 
one should have to say it, but here the fact is, that white 
men, Christian men, have taken these people, have drawn 
under the banner of Christianity and under Christian 
pay all the warlike tribes, armed them, and set them as 
task-masters over the humble and meek. And never 
in the history of the world has such a state of servitude 
been known as at present exists in the country of this 
forlorn people. 

They had been marching some three hours when, 
from ahead came a sound as of some huge animal approach- 
ing. Berselius half turned to his gun-bearer for his rifle, 
but Felix reassured him. 

# < Cassava bearers,” said Felix, 



















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THE VOICE OF THE CONGO FOREST 69 


It was, in fact, a crowd of natives; some thirty or 
forty, bearing loads of Kwanga (cassava cakes) to Yand- 
jali. They were coming along the forest path in single 
file, their burdens on their heads, and when the leaders 
saw the white men they stopped dead. A great chat- 
tering broke out. One could hear it going back all 
along the unseen line, a rattlesnake of sound. Then 
Felix called out to them; the gun-bearers and the 
white men stood aside, and the cassava bearers, taking 
heart, advanced. 

They were heavily laden, for most of them had from 
ten to twenty Kwanga on their heads, and besides this 
burden — they were mostly women — several of them 
had babies slung on their backs. 

These people belonged to a village which lay within 
Verhaeren’s district. The tax laid on this village was 
three hundred cakes of cassava to be delivered at Yand- 
jali every eight days. 

The people of this village were a lazy lot, and if you 
have ever collected taxes in England, you can fancy the 
trouble of making such people — savages living in a 
tropical forest, who have no count of time and scarcely 
an idea of numbers — pay up. 

Especially when one takes into consideration the 
fact that to produce three hundred cakes of cassava every 
eight days, the whole village must work literally like a 
beehive, the men gathering and the women grinding the 
stuff from dawn till dark. 

Only by the heaviest penalties could such a desir- 
able state of things be brought about, and the heavier 


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70 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


and sharper, the punishments inflicted at any one time, 
the easier was it for Verhaeren to work these people. 

Adams watched the cassava bearers as they passed 
at a trot. They went by like automatic figures, without 
raising their eyes from the ground. There were some 
old women amongst them who looked more like shrivelled 
monkeys than human beings; extraordinary anatomical 
Specimens, whose muscles working as they ran, were as 
visible as though no skin covered them. There were 
young women, young children, and women far advanced 
in pregnancy; and they all went bv like automatic figures, 
clockwork marionettes. 

It was a pitiable spectacle enough, these laden creatures, 
mute looking as dumb beasts; but there was nothing 
especially to shock the eye of the European, for it is the 
long-prepared treason against this people, devised and 
carried out by nature, that their black mask covers a 
multitude of other people’s sins and their own untold 
sufferings. 

Had they been white, the despairing look, the sunken 
eves, the hundred signs that tell of suffering and slavery 
would have been visible, would have appealed to the heart 
but the black mass could not express these things fully. 
They were niggers, uglier looking and more depressed 
looking than other niggers — that was all. 

And so Adams passed on, without knowing what he 
had seen and the only impression the sight made on his 
mind was one of disgust. 

One fact his professional eye noticed as the crowd 
passed by. Four of the women had lost their left hands* 


I 

£ 


THE VOICE OF THE CONGO FOREST 71 


The hands had been amputated just above the wrist 
in three cases, and one woman had suffered amputation 
at the middle of the forearm. 

Jle spoke of this to Berselius, who did not seem to hear 
his remark. 

At noon they halted for a three hours’ rest, and then 
pushed on, camping for the night, after a twenty-five 
miles’ journey, in a break of the forest. 




















































CHAPTER IX 


BIG GAME 

J UST as going along the coast by Pondoland one 
sees English park scenery running down to the 
very sea edge, so the Congo has its surprises in 
strips of country that might, as far as appearance goes, 
have been cut out of Europe and planted here. 

This glade which Felix had chosen for a camping 
place was strewn with rough grass and studded here and 
there with what at first sight seemed apple trees: they 
were in reality thorns. 

The camp was pitched and the fires lit on the edge 
of the forest, and then Berselius proceeded to take tale 
of his people and found one missing. One of the cook 
boys had dropped behind and vanished. He had been 
lame shortly after the start. The soldiers had not seen 
him drop behind, but the porters had. 

“How many miles away was it?” asked Berselius 
of the collected porters. 

“Nkoto, nkoto” (very many, very many), the answer 
came in a chorus, for a group of savages, if they have 
the same idea in common, will all shout together in 
response to an answer, like one man. 

“Why had they not told ?” 


72 


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BIG GAME 


73 


“We did not know,” came the irrelevant answer in 
chorus. 

Berselius knew quite well that they had not told 
simply from heedlessness and want of initiative. He would 
have flogged the whole lot soundly, but he wanted them 
fresh for the morrow’s work. Cutting down their rations 
would but weaken them, and as for threatening to dock 
their pay, such a threat has no effect on a savage. 

“Look!” said Berselius. 

He had just dismissed the porters with a reprimand 
when his keen eye caught sight of something far up the 
glade. It wanted an hour of sunset. 

Adams, following the direction in which Berselius 
was gazing, saw, a great distance off, to judge by the 
diminishing size of the thorn trees, a form that made 
his heart to leap in him. 

Massive and motionless, a great creature stood humped 
in the level light; the twin horns back-curving and sil- 
houetted against the sky told him at once what it was. 

“Bull rhinoceros,” said Berselius. “Been lying up 
in the thick stuff all day; come out to feed.” He made 
a sign to Felix who, knowing exactly what was wanted, 
dived into the tent and came back with a .400 cordite 
rifle and Adams’s elephant gun. 

“Come,” said Berselius, “the brute is evidently think- 
ing. They stay like that for an hour sometimes. If 
we have any luck, we may get a shot sideways before he 
moves. There ’s not a breath of wind.” 

They started, Felix following with the guns. 

“I would not bother about him,” said Berselius, 











































































































































































































































































74 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


“only the meat will be useful, and it will be an experience 
for you. You will take first shot, and, if he charges, aim 
just behind the shoulder, that ’s the spot for a rhino if 
you can reach it, for other animals aim at the neck, no 
matter what animal it is, or whether it is a rhino or a 
buck; the neck shot is the knockout blow. I have seen 
a lion shot through the heart travel fifty yards and 
kill a man; had he been struck in the neck he would 
have fallen in his tracks.” 

“Cow,” said Felix from behind. 

Out of the thick stuff on the edge of the forest another 
form had broken. She was scarcely smaller than the 
bull, but the horns were shorter; she was paler in colour, 
too, and showed up not nearly so well. Then she van- 
ished into the thick stuff, but the bull remained standing, 

immovable as though he were made of cast iron, and the 
' © 

two awful horns now more distinct, cut the background 
like scimitars. 

The rhinoceros, like the aboriginal native of the Congo, 
has come straight down from pre-Adamite days almost 
without change. He is half blind now; he can scarcely 
see twenty yards, he is still moving in the night of the 
ancient world, and the smell of a man exdtes the wildest 
apprehension in his vestige of a mind. He scents you, 
flings his heavy head from side to side, and then to all 
appearances he charges you. 

Nothing could appear more wicked, ferocious, and 
full of deadly intent than this charge; yet, in reality, the 
unfortunate brute h net seeking you at all, but running 
away from you; for the rhino when running away always 






BIG GAME 


75 


runs in the direction from which the wind is blowing. 
You are in that direction, else your scent could not reach 
him; as your scent grows stronger and stronger, the more 
alarmed does he become and the quicker he runs. Now 
he sights you, or you fire. If you miss, God help you, 
for he charges the flash with all his fright suddenly 
changed to fury. 

They had got within four hundred yards from the 
brute when a faint puff of wind stirred the grass, and 
instantly the rhino shifted his position. 

“He ’s got our scent, ” said Berselius, taking the cor- 
dite rifle from Felix, who handed his gun also to Adams. 
“He ’s got it strong. We will wait for him here.” 

The rhino, after a few uneasy movements, began to 
“run about.” One could see that the brute was ill at 
ease; he went in a half-circle, and then, the wind increas- 
ing, and bringing the scent strong, he headed straight 
for Berselius and his companions, and charged. 

The sound of him coming was like the sound of a great 
drum beaten by a lunatic. 

“Don’t fire till I give the word,” cried Berselius, 
“and aim just behind the shoulder.” 

Adams, who was to the left of the charging beast, 
raised the rifle and looked down the sights. He knew 
that if he missed the brute would charge the flash and 
be on him perhaps before he could give it the second 
barrell. 

It was exactly like standing before an advancing 
express engine. An engine, moreover, that had the power 
of leaving the metals to chase you should you not derail it. 




































































































































































































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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


Would Berselius never speak! Berselius all the time 
was glancing from the rhino to Adams. 

“Fire!” 

The ear-blasting report of the elephant gun echoed 
from the forest, and the rhino, just as if he had been tripped 
by an invisible wire fence, fell, tearing up the ground and 
Squealing like a pig. 

“Good,” said Berselius. 

Adams wiped the sweat from his forehead with the 
back of his hand. He had never gone through a moment 
of more deadly nerve tension. 

He was moving toward his quarry, now stretched 
stiff and stark, when he was arrested by Felix. 

“Cow,” said Felix again. 

The cow had broken cover at the report of the gun 
and had got their wind. 

Just as two automatic figures of the same make will, 
when wound up, and touched off, perform the same 
actions, the cow did exactly what the bull had done — 
ran about in a fierce and distressed manner and then 
charged right in the eye of the wind. 

“Mine,” said Berselius, and he went forward twenty 
paces to meet her. 

Berselius, chilling and aloof to the point of mysterious- 
ness, had, since the very starting of the expedition, shown 
little of his true character to his companion. What he 
had shown up to this had not lowered Adams’s respect 
for him. 

Self-restraint seemed the mainspring of that com- 
manding force which this strange man exercised. His 





































































































































































































































BIG GAME 


77 


reprimand to the porters for the loss of the boy, expressed 
in a few quiet words, had sent them shivering to their 
places, cowed and dumb. Animal instinct seemed to tell 
them of a terrible animal which the self-restraint of that 
quiet-looking, little man, with the pointed beard, alone 
prevented from breaking upon them. 

Berselius had allowed the bull to approach to a little 
over a hundred yards before letting Adams fire. He 
had gauged the American’s nerve to a nicety and his 
power of self-restraint, and he knew that beyond the 
hundred-yard limit h? dared not trust them; for no man 
born of woman who has not had a good experience of 
big game can stand up to a charging rhinoceros and 
take certain aim when the hundred-yard limit has 
been passed. 

The thunderous drumming of the oncoming brute 
echoed from the forest. Had its head been a feather- 
pillow the impact of the three tons of solid flesh mov- 
ing behind it would have been certain death; but the 
head was an instrument of destruction, devised when the 
megatherium walked the world, and the long raking horn 
would have ripped up an elephant as easily as a sharp 
penknife rips up a rabbit. 

Before this thing, and to the right of it, rifle in 
hand, stood Berselius. He did not even lift the gun 
to his shoulder till the hundred-yard limit was 
passed, and then he hung on his aim so horribly that 
Adams felt the sweat-drops running on his face like 
ants, and even Felix swallowed like a man who is 
trying to choke down something nauseous. It was a 



78 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


magnificent exhibition of daring and self-restraint and 
cool assurance. 

At twenty-five yards or a little under, the cordite rang 
out. The brute seemed to trip, just as the other had done, 
over some invisible taut-stretched wire, and skidding with 
its own impetus, squealing, striking out and tearing up 
the grass, it came right up to Berselius’s feet before stif- 
fening in death. Like the great automaton it was, it had 
scented the human beings just as the bull had scented 
them, “fussed” just as he had fussed, charged as he had 
charged, and died as he had died. 

And now from the camp rose a great outcry, “Nyama, 
nyama!” (meat, meat!). From the soldiers, from the 
gun-bearers, from the porters it came. There were no 
longer soldiers, or gun-bearers, or porters; every dis- 
tinction was forgotten; they were all savages, voicing 
the eternal cry of the jungle, “Nyama, nyama!” (meat, 
meat !) . 

In the last rays of the sunset the two gigantic forms 
lay stretched forever in death. They lay as they had 
composed themselves after that long stiff stretch which 
every animal takes before settling itself for eternal sleep; 
and Adams stood looking at the great grinning masks 
tipped with the murderous horns, whilst Berselius, with 
his gun butt resting on his boot, stood watching with a 
brooding eye as the porters and gun-bearers swarmed like 
ants around the slain animals and proceeded, under his 
direction, to cut them up. Then the meat was brought 
into camp. The tails and the best parts of the carcasses, 
including the kidneys, were reserved for the white men, 






BIG GAME 


79 


und the rations from the rest of the meat were served 
out; but a dozen porters who had been last in the line, 
and who were accountable for letting the boy drop behind 
got nothing. 

It was pitiable to see their faces. But they deserved 
their punishment, notwithstanding the fact that in the 
middle of the meat distribution the missing boy limped 
into camp. He had a thorn half an inch long in his foot, 
which Adams extracted. Then the camp went to bed. 

Adams in his tent under the mosquito net slept soundlv 
and heard and knew nothing of the incidents of the night. 
Berselius was also sleeping soundlv when, at about one 
o'clock in the morning, Felix aroused him. 

One of the porters had been caught stealing some 
of the meat left over from the distribution of the night 
before. 

The extraordinary thing was that he had fed well, 
not being one of the prescribed. He had stolen from 
pure greed. 

He was an undersized man, a weakling, and likely 
to break down and give trouble any way. His crime 
was great. 

Berselius sent Felix to his tent for a Mauser pistol. 
Then the body was flung into the forest where the 
roaring, rasping cry of a leopard was splitting the dark. 




























































































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CHAPTER X 


m’bassa 

S EVEN days’ march took them one hundred and 
twenty miles east of Yandjali and into the heart 
of the great rubber district of M’bonga. 

Twenty miles a day ought to have been covered on an 
average, but they had delayed here and there to shoot, 
and the extra porters, whose duty it was to carry the 
trophies, were already in requisition. 

It had been forest most of the way, but forest broken 
by open spaces; they had crossed two great swards of 
park-like country where the antelope herds moved like 
clouds, marvellous natural preserves that might have 
been English but for the tropic haze and heat and the 
great Nsambya trees with their yellow bell-like blossoms, 
the mbinas with their bursts of scarlet bloom, the tall 

f 'Y ^ • • • 

feather-palms, and the wild papaws of the adjoining 
woods. 

But in the last two days of the march the forest had 
thickened and taken a more sombre note; nothing they 
had come upon heretofore had been quite so wild as this, 
so luxuriant and tropical. It was the haunt of the rubber 
vine, that mysterious plant which requires a glass-house 
atmosphere and a soil especially rich. The great rubber 

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M’BASSA 


81 


forest of M’Bonga, thousands of square miles in extent, 
is really composed of two forests joined by an isthmus 
of woods. Dimly, it is shaped like an hourglass; south 
of the constriction where the two forests join lies the 
elephant country for which Berselius was making, and 
Felix had led them so craftily and well, that they struck 
into the rubber district only fifty miles from the 
constriction. 

In the forest, thirty miles from the elephant ground, 
lies the Belgian port M’Bassa. They were making for 
this place now, which was to be the base from which 
they would start on the great hunt. 

The fort of M’ bass a is not used to-day as a fort, only 
as a collecting-place for rubber. In the early days it 
was a very necessary entrenchment for the Belgians, as 
a tribe almost as warlike as the Zappo Zaps terrorized 
the districts; but the people of this tribe have long been 
brought under the blue flag with the white star. They 
are now “soldiers,” and their savagery, like a keen tool, 
has been turned to good account by the Government. 

In the great forest of M’Bonga the rubber vines are not 
equally distributed. Large areas occur in which they 
are not found r only in the most desolate places do they 
grow. You cannot tame and prune and bring the rubber 
vine into subjection; it will have nothing to do with the 
vineyard and the field; it chooses to grow alone. 

Everything else comes to its harvest with a joyous face, 
but the rubber vine, like a dark green snake, fearful of 
death, has to be hunted for. 

Even in the areas of the forest which it frequents, 






















































































































































































THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


£2 

it is only to be found in patches, so the harvesters cannot 
go in a body, as men do to the harvesting of the corn, or 
the cotton, or the grape; they have to break up into small 
parties and these again subdivide, leaving a single indivi- 
dual here and there where the vines are thickest. He, 
entirely alone, at the mercy of the evil spirits that are in 
his imagination and the beasts that are in the forest, 
makes a rude shelter out of boughs and leaves, and sets 
to work making incisions in the vine and draining them 
drop by drop of their viscous sap. 

Sometimes he sings over this monotonous work, and 
in the long rains between the intervals of the shower- 
bath roarings you can hear the ulutations of these folk 
through the drip of the leaves, and at night the spark- 
like glimmer of their fires dots the reeking gloom. 

These are the conditions of the rubber collector’s 
task, and it is not a task that ever can be finished; year 
in, year out, it never ceases. 

These woods through which Felix led them were to 
the woods near Yandjali what the music of Beethoven 
is to the music of Mozart. 

Immense and gloomy symphonies. The trees were 
fyuge, and groaned beneath the weight of lianas cable- 
thick. At times they had to burst their way through 
the veils of leaves and vines, the porters losing themselves 
and calling one to the other, and the head of the expedition 
halting till the stragglers were collected; at times the 
ground they trod on was like grease from the cast-down 
fruit of the plantains that grew here enormous, and sod- 
den, and dismal, showering their fruit in such quantities 































































M’BASSA 


83 

that the bush-pigs, devour as they might, could never 
dispose of it all. 

On some of the trees, like huge withered leaves, hung 
bats, and from some of the trees the beard-moss hung 
yards long, and of a spectral gray; the very weeds trodden 
underfoot were sappy, and the smell of their squirting 
juice mixed itself with the smell of decay. 

-It was not even ground, either; the whole forest would 
dip down into an unseen valley; you felt yourself going * 
*down hill, down, down, and then you knew you were at 
the bottom of a sub-arboreal valley by the deeper stag- 
nation of the air. Open spaces, when they came, showed 
little sky, and they were less open spaces than rooms in 
the surrounding prison. 

Felix was not leading them through the uttermost 
depths of this place; he was following the vague indica- 
tions of a road by which the rubber from M’Bassa was 
carted to the river. 

They were travelling along a highway, in fact, and the 
dimmest indication of a track where other men have been 
before is a thing which robs the wilderness of much of 
its terror. ' * 

' The loneliness of the forest beyond track or way, in 
those vast depths where the rubber collectors have to go 
alone, I leave you to imagine. 

At last, at noon, on the third day of their journey to 
this place they struck rising ground where the trees fell 
away till no trees were left, and the blue sky of heaven 
lay above their heads, and before them on the highest 
point of the rise Fort M’Bassa burning in the sun. 



































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CHAPTER XI 


ANDREAS MEEUS 

HE Parthenon in all its glory could not have 
looked more beautiful to the returning Greek than 
this half- ruined fort in the eyes of Adams. 

A thing built by the hands of white men and shone 
on by the sun — what could be more acceptable to the 
eve after the long, long tram]) through the heartbreaking 
forest ! 

The fort of M’bassa was quite small; the surrounding 
walls had gone to decay, but the “guest-house” and the 
office, and the great go-down where the rubber was 
stored, were in good repair and well thatched. 

Outside the walls were a number of wretched hovels 
inhabited by the “soldiers” and their wives, and one 
of these soldiers, a tall black, with the eternal red fez 
on his head and a rifle slung on his back, was the first to 
sight the coming expedition, and to notify its approach 
with a yell that brought a dozen like him from the sun- 
baked hovels and, a moment later from the office, a white 
man in a pith helmet, who stood for a moment looking 
across the half-ruined wall at the newcomers, and then 
advanced to meet them. 

He was a middle-sized man, with a melancholy face 


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ANDREAS MEENUS 


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that showed very white under the shadow of the helmet; 
he was dressed in dingy white drill, and he had a cigarette 
between his lips. 

He looked like a man who had never in his life smiled, 
yet his face was not an unpleasant face altogether, though 
there was much in it to give the observer pause. 

His voice was not an unpleasant voice, altogether, vet 
there was that in it, as he greeted Berselius, which struck 
Adams sharply and strangely; for the voice of Andreas 
Meeus, Chef de Poste at M’Bassa, was the voice of a 
man who for two years had been condemned to talk the 
language of the natives. It had curious inflections, 
hesitancies, and a dulness that expressed the condition 
of a brain condemned for two years to think the thoughts 
of the natives in their own language. 

Just as the voice of a violin expresses the condition 
of the violin, so does the voice of a man express the con- 
dition of his mind. And that is the fact that will strike 
you most if you travel in the wilds of the Congo State and 
talk to the men of your own colour who are condemned 
to live amongst thp people. 

One might have compared Meeus’s voice to the voice of 
a violin — a violin that had been attacked by some strange 
fungoid growth that had filled its interior and dulled 
the sounding board. 

He had been apprised a month before of the coming 
of Berselius’s expedition, and one might imagine the servil- 
ity which this man would show to the all-powerful Ber- 
silius, whose hunting expeditions were red-carpeted, who 
was hail-fellow-well-met with Leopold, who, by lifting 

























THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


86 

his finger could cause Andreas Meeus to be dismissed 
from his post, and by crooking his finger cause him to be 
raised to a commissionership. 

Yet he showed no servility at all. He had left servility 
behind him. just as he had left pride, just as he had left 
ambition, patriotism, country, and that divine something 
which blossoms into love of wife and child. 

When he had shaken hands with Berselius and Adams, 
he led the way into the fort, or rather into the enclosure 
surrounded by the ruinous mud walls, an enclosure of 
about a hundred yards square. 

On the right of the quadrangle stood the go-down, 
where the rubber and a small quantity of ivory was stored. 

In the centre stood the misnamed guest house, a 
large mud and wattle building, with a veranda gone 
to decay. 

The blinding sun shone on it all, showing up with its 
fierce light the true and appalling desolation of the place. 
There was not one thing in the enclosure upon which 
the eye could rest with thankfulness. 

Turning from the enclosure and looking across the 
fort wall to the distance, one saw a world as far from 
civilization as the world that Romulus looked at when he 
gazed across the wall outlining the first dim sketch of 
Rome. 

To the north, forest; to the south, forest; to the east 
forest; and to the west, eternal and illimitable forest. 
Blazing sun, everlasting haze that in the rainy season 
would become mist and silence. 

In the storms and under the rains the great rubber 



ANDREAS MEENUS 


87 


forest of M’Bonga would roar like a reef-tormented sea., 
but on a day like this, when, gazing from the high ground 
of the fort, the eye travelled across the swelling domes 
and heat-stricken valleys of foliage, the pale green of the 
feather-palms, the sombre green of the nsambyas, to the 
haze that veiled all things beyond, on a day like this ? 
§ilence g^zed at one Sphinx-like, and from the distance 
pf a million years. Silence that had brooded upon Africa 
before Africa had a name, before Pharaoh was born„ 
before Thebes was built. 

Meeus led the way into the guest house, which con- 
tained only two rooms — rooms spacious enough, but 
bare of everything except the ordinary necessities of life. 
In the living room there was a table of white deal-like 
wood and three or four chairs evidently made by natives 
from a European design. A leopard skin, badly dried and 
shrivelling at the edges, hung on one wall, presumably as 
an ornament; on another wall some Congo bows and 
arrows — bows with enormously thick strings and 
arrows poisoned so skilfully that a scratch from one would 
kill you, though they had been hanging there for many 
years. They were trophies of the early days when Fort 
M’Bassa was really a fort, and from those woods down 
there clouds of soot-black devils, with filed teeth, raided 
the place, only to be swept away by rifle fire. 

There was no picture torn from an illustrated paper 
adorning the place, as in Verhaeren’s abode, but on a 
rudely constructed shelf there lay just the same stack of 
“official letters,” some of these two years old, some of 
last month, all dealing with trade* 

































































































































































































































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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


Meeus brought out cigarettes and gin, but Berselius, 
safe now at his base of operations, to make a little festival 
of the occasion sent to the stores, which his porters had 
deposited in the go-down, for a magnum of champagne. 
It was Cliquot, and as Meeus felt the glow of the wine in 
his veins, a flush came into his hollow cheeks and a bright- 
ness into his dull eyes; forgotten things stirred again in 
his memory, with the shadows of people he had known — 
the glitter of lamplit streets in Brussels, the glare of the 
Cafe de Couronne — all the past, such as it was, lay in 
the wine. 

Meeus was orie of the “unfortunate men.” He had 
held a small clerkship uncjer the Belgian Government, 
from which he had been dismissed through a fault of 
his own. 

This was five years ago. Up to his dismissal he had 
led the peddling and sordid life that a small government 
clerk on the Continent leads if he has nothing to save him 
from himself and from his fellows: the dry rot of official 
life had left him useless for anything but official life. A 
sensualist in a small way, he enlarged his sphere on the 
day of his dismissal, when he found himself cut off from 
work and adrift in the world, with five hundred francs in 
his pocket. In one glorious debauch, which lasted a week, 
he spent the five hundred francs, and then he settled down 
to live on a maiden aunt. 

He called it looking for work. 

She lasted for a year and nine months, and then 
she died, and her annuitv died with her He felt her 
loss deeply, for not only had her money helped to 





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ANDREAS MEENUS 


89 


support him, but she was his only real friend, and he 
had a heart in those days that seemed so far distant 
from him now. 

Then it was that Poverty took him by the hand and 
explained patiently and with diagrams the hardness of 
the world, the atrocious position of the declasse , who has 
never studied the art of roguery so as to make a living bv 
it, and the utter uselessness as friends of those good 
fellows who sat in the cafes and walked the boulevards 
and ogled the women. 

He tramped the streets of Brussels, at first in seedy 
clothes and at last in filth and horrible rags. A relative 
came to his assistance with two hundred francs; he 
bought himself clothes and made himself respectable, 
but, in a fortnight, found himself relapsing again, sinking 
like a swimmer whose momentary support has gone to 
pieces. 

Just as the waves were again about to close over his 
benighted head, an acquaintance got him a post under 
government. Not under the Belgian but the Congo 
Government. 

Andreas Meeus was exactly the type of man this 
government required, and still requires, and still uses 
and must continue to use as long as the infernal machine 
which it has invented for the extraction of gold from 
niggers continues to work. A man, that is to say, who 
has eaten orange-peel picked up in the market-place; 
a man who has worn out his friends — and his clothes. 
A man without hope. 

One would think for the work in hand they would 


































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90 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


choose the greatest blackguards possible: convicts con- 
victed of the worst crimes of violence. Not at all. These 
men would be for one thing too intractable; for another 
thing, too unstable, and for another thing (strange to say)* 
possessed of too much heart. The Congo Government 
knows its work far too well for that. It does not take the 
murderer or the violent criminal from the penitentiarv 
to do its work; it takes from the streets the man without 
hope. The educated man who has fallen, the man who 
can still think. 

Meeus went to Africa just as a man goes to prison. 
He hated the idea of going, but he had to go, or stay and 
starve. He was stationed three months at Boma and 
then he was moved to a post on the Upper Congo, a small 
and easily worked post, where he found out the full con- 
ditions of his new servitude. 

This post had to do with what they call in the jargon 
of the Congo administration, forest exploitation. Gum 
Copal and wax was the stuff he had to extract from the 
people round about. 

Here he found himself morally in the clutches of that 
famous and infamous proclamation issued from Brussels 
on the twentieth of June, 1892, by Secretary of State, 
Van Estvelde. 

The Bonus Proclamation. 

According to the terms of this proclamation, Meeus 
found that besides his pay he could get a bonus on every 
kilo of wax and copal he could extract from the natives, 
and that the cheaper he could get the stuff the more his 
bonus would be t 




































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ANDREAS MEENUS 


91 


Thus, for every kilo of wax or copal screwed out of the 
natives at a cost of five centimes or less, he received into 
his pocket a bonus of fifteen centimes, that is to say the 
bonus to Meeus was three times what the natives got; if 
by any laxity or sense of justice, the cost of the wax or 
copal rose to six centimes a kilo, Meeus only got ten cen- 
times bonus, and so on. 

The cheaper he got the stuff the more he was paid 
for it. And those were the terms on which he had to trade 
with the natives. 

Then there were the taxes. The natives had to bring 
in huge quantities of wax and copal for nothing, just as 
a tax owing to the state, a tax to the government that 
was plundering and exploiting them. 

Meeus, who had a spice of the tradesman in him, fell 
into this state of things as easily as a billiard ball falls 
into a pocket when skilfully directed. 

The unfortunate man was absolutely a billiard ball 
in the hands of a professional player; the stroke of the 
eye had been given in Belgium, he rolled to his appointed 
post, fell into it, and was damned, 

His fingers became crooked and a dull hunger for 
money filled his soul. His success in working the niggers 
was so great that he was moved to a more difficult post 
at higher pay, and then right on to M’Bassa. 

He was not naturally a cruel man. In his childhood 
he had been fond of animals, but Metabiche, the god- 
devil of the Congo, changed all that. 

He saw nothing extortionate in his dealings, nothing 
wrong in them. When things were going well, then all 

































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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


was well ; but when the natives resisted his . charges and 
taxes, defrauding him of his bonus and lowering him 
in the eyes of his superiors, then Meeus became terrible. 

And he was absolute master. 

Away here in the lonely fort, in the midst of the great 
M’Bonga rubber forest that was now speechless as a 
. Sphinx, now roaring at him like a sea in torment; here 
jn the endless sunlight of the dry seasons and the endless 
misery of the rains, Meeus driven in upon himself, had 
4;ime to think. 

There is no prison so terrible as a limitless prison. 
Far better for a man to inhabit a cell in Dartmoor than a 
post in the desert of the forest. The walls are companion- 
able things, but there is no companionship in distance. 

Meeus knew what it was to look over the walls of the 
fort and watch another sun setting on another day, and 
another darkness heralding another night. He knew 
what it was to watch infinite freedom and to know it for 
his captor and jailer. He knew what it was to wake 
from his noonday siesta and see the same great awful 
splash of sunlight striking the same old space of arid yard, 
where the empty tomato tin lay by the rotten plantain 
cast over by some nigger child. He knew what it was to 
lie and hear the flies buzzing and wonder what tune of the 
devil it was they were trying to imitate. He knew what 
it was to think of death with the impotent craving of a 
sick child for some impossible toy. 

Look into your own life and see all the tiny things that 
save you from ennui and devilment, and give you heart to 
continue the journey from hour to hour in this world 

























































































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ANDREAS MEENUS 


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where we live. Your morning paper, the new book from 
the library you have just got to read, the pipe you hope 
to smoke when you return from work, the very details 
of your work; a hundred and one petty things that make 
up the day of an ordinary man, breaking the monotony 
and breaking the prospect before him into short views. 

Meeus had none of these. Without literature or love, 
without a woman to help him through, without a child 
to care for or a dog to care for him, there at Fort M’Bassa 
in the glaring sunshine he faced his fate and became 
what he was. 

















































































































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CHAPTER XII 

NIGHT AT THE FORT 

T HE night was hot and close and the paraffin lamp 
in the guest house mixed its smell with the 
tobacco smoke and with a faint, faint musky 
odour that came from the night outside. Every now and 
then a puff of hot wind blew through the open doorway, 
hot and damp as though a great panther were breathing 
into the room. 

The nights in the forest were chill, but up here at Fort 
M’Bassa they were stewing in a heat wave. 

Adams, with his coat off, pipe in mouth, was leaning 
'back in a basket chair with his feet on a sugar box. 
Berselius, in another easy chair, was smoking a cigar, 
'and Meeus, sitting with his elbows on the table, was talk- 
ing of trade and its troubles. There is an evil spirit in 
■rubber that gives a lot of trouble to those who deal with 
1 it. The getting of it is bad enough, but the tricks of the 
thing itself are worse. It is subject to all sorts of 
influences, climatic and other, and tends to deteriorate on 
•its journey to the river and the coast of Europe. 

It was marvellous to see the passion with which this 
saian spoke of this inanimate thing. 

“And then, ivory,” said Meeus. “When I came here 
94 




NIGHT AT THE FORT 


9 5 


first, hundred-pound tusks were common; when you reach 
that district, M. le Capitaine, you will see for yourself, no 
doubt, that the elephants have decreased. What comes in 
now, even, is not of the same quality. Scrivelloes (small 
tusks), defective tusks, for which one gets almost nothing 
as a bonus. And with the decrease of the elephant comes 
the increased subterfuge of the natives. ‘What are we to 
do?’ they say, ‘We cannot make elephants.’ This is 
the worst six months for ivory I have had, and then, on 
top of this — for troubles always come together — I have 
this bother I told you of with these people down there bv 
the Silent Pools.” 

A village ten miles to the east had, during the last few 
weeks, suspended rubber payments, gone arrear in taxes, 
the villagers running off into the forest and hiding from 
their hateful work, 

“What caused the trouble?” asked Berselius. 

“God knows/’ replied Meeus. “It may blow over — 
it may have blown over by this, for I have had no word 
for two days; anyhow, to-morrow I will walk over and 
see. If it hasn’t blown over, I will give the people very 
clearly to understand that there will be trouble. I will 
stay there for a few days and see what persuasion can do. 
Would you like to come with me ?” 

“I don’t mind,” said Berselius. “A few days’ rest 
will do the porters no harm. What do you say. Dr. 
Adams?” 

“I ’m with you,” said Adams. “Anything better than 
to stay back here alone. How do you find it here, M. 
Meeus, when you are by yourself ? ” 



















96 


THE POOLS OF SILANCE 


“Oh, one lives,” replied the Chef de Poste , looking 
^tt the cigarette between his fingers with a dreamy expres- 
sion, and speaking as though he were addressing it. “ One 
lives.” 

That, thought Adams, must be the worst part about 
it. But he did not speak the words. He was a silent 
man, slow of speech but ready with sympathy, and as he 
lounged comfortably in his chair, smoking his pipe, his 
pity for Meeus was profound. The man had been for 
t>vo years in this benighted solitude; two years without 
seeing a white face, excepf on the rare occasion of a dis- 
trict commissioner’s visit. 

He ought to have been mad by this, thought Adams; 
and he was a judge, for he had studied madness and its 
causes. 

But Meeus was not mad in the least particular. He 
was coldly sane. Lust had saved his reason, the lust 
inspired by Matabiche. 

Berselius’s cook brought in some coffee, and when they 
had talked long enough about the Congo trade in its 
various branches, they went out and smoked their pipes, 
leaning or sitting on the low wall of the fort. 

The first quarter of the moon, low in the sky and looking 
like a boat-shaped Japanese lantern, lav above the forest. 
The forest, spectral-pale and misty, lay beneath the moon; 
the heat was sweltering, and Adams could not keep the 
palms of his hands dry, rub them with his pocket 
handkerchief or on his knees as much as he would. 

This is the heat that makes a man feel limp as a wet 
rag; the heat that liquefies morals and manners and 



NIGHT AT THE FORT 


97 


temper and nerve force, so that they run with the sweat 
from the pores. Drink will not “bite” in this heat, and 
a stiff glass of brandy affects the head almost as little as 
a glass of water. 

“It is over there,” said Meeus, pointing to the south- 
-east, “that we are going to-morrow to interview those 
beasts.” 

Adams started at the intensity of loathing expressed 
by Meeus in that sentence. He had spoken almost 
^angrily at rubber and tusks, but his languid, complaining 
voice had held nothing like this before. 

Those beasts! He hated them, and he would not 
have been human had he not hated them. They were 
his jailers in very truth, their work was his deliverance. 

The revolt of this village would make him short of 
rubber, probably it would bring a reprimand from his 
superiors. 

A great bat flitted by so'clotfe that the smell of it poisoned 
the air, and from the forest, far away to the west, came the 
ripping saw-like cry of a leopard on the prowl. Many 
fierce things were hunting in the forest that night, but 
nothing fiercer than Meeus; as he stood in the moonlight, 
cigarette in mouth, staring across the misty forest in the 
direction of the Silent Pools. 







































































































































































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PART THREE 



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CHAPTER XIII 


THE pools of silence 

N EXT morning Berselius ordered Felix to have the 
tents taken from the go-down and enough stores 
for two days. Tents and stores would be carried 
by the “soldiers” of the fort, who were to accompany 
them on the expedition. 

Adams noticed with surprise the childlike interest 
Meeus took in the belongings of Berselius; the green 
rot-proof tents* the latest invention of Europe, seemed 
to appeal to him especially; the Roorkee chairs, the 
folding baths, the mosquito nets of the latest pattern, 
the cooking utensils of pure aluminum, filled his 
simple mind with astonishment. His mind during 
his sojourn at Fort M’Bassa had, in fact, grown child- 
like in this particular; nothing but little things appealed 
to him. 

Whilst the expedition was getting ready Adams strolled 
about outside the fort walls. The black “soldiers,’ 
who were to accompany them, were seated in the sun near 
their hovels, some of them cleaning their rifles, others 
smoking; but for their rifles and fez caps they might, with 
a view of Carthage in the distance, have been taken for 
the black legionaries of Hamilear, ferocious mercenaries 
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102 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


without country or God, fierce as the music of the leopard- 
skin drums that led them to battle. 

Turning, he walked round the west wall till he came 
to the wall on the north, which was higher than the others. 
Here, against the north wall, was a sheltered cover like 
an immense sty, indescribably filthy and evil-smelling; 
about thirty rings were fastened to the wall, and from 
each ring depended a big rusty chain ending in a collar. 

It was the Hostage House of Fort M’Bassa. It was 
empty now, but nearly always full, and it stood there 
like a horrible voiceless witness. 

A great disgust filled the mind of Adams; disgust 
of the niggers who had evidently lately inhabited this 
place, and disgust of the Belgians who had herded them 
there. He felt there was something very wrong in the 
state of Congo. The Hostage House of Yandjali had 
started the impression; Meeus in some subtle way had 
deepened it; and now this. 

But he fully recognized what difficult people to deal 
with niggers are. He felt that all this was slavery under 
a thin disguise, this so-called taxation and ‘'trade,” but 
it was not his affair. 

All work is slavery more or less pleasant. The doctor 
is the slave of his patients, the shopkeeper of his clients. 
These niggers were, no doubt, slaves of the Belgians, 
but they were not bought and sold; they had to work, it 
is true, but all men have to work. Besides, Berselius 
had told him that the Belgians had stopped the liquor 
traffic and stopped the Arab raiders. There was good 
and bad on the side of the Belgians, and the niggers 




































































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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 103 

were niggers. So reasoned Adams, and with reason 
enough, though from insufficient data. 

At eight o’clock in the blazing sunshine, that even 
then was oppressive, the expedition started. The white, 
men leading, Felix coming immediately behind, and 
eleven of the soldiers, bearing the tents and stores for 
two days, following after. 

They plunged into the forest, taking a dim track, 
which was the rubber track from the village of the Silent 
Pools and from half a dozen other villages to the west. 
The ground here was different from the ground thev had 
traversed in coming to the fort. This was boggy; here 
and there the foot sank with a sough into the pulp of 
morass and rotten leaves; the lianas were thinner and more 
snaky, the greenery, if possible, greener, and the air close 
and moist as the air of a steam-bath. 

The forest of M’Bonga has great tracts of this boggy, 
pestiferous land, dreadful sloughs of despond caverned 
with foliage, and by some curse the rubber vines entrench 
themselves with these, The naked rubber collectors, 
shivering over their fires, are attacked by the rheumatism 
and dysentery and fever that lie in these swamps; diseases 
almost merciful, for the aches and pains they cause draw 
the mind away from the wild beasts and devils and 
phantoms that haunt the imagination of the rubber 
slaves. 

It took them three hours to do the ten miles, and then 
at last the forest cleared away and fairyland appeared. 

Here in the very depths of the hopeless jungle, as if 
laid out and forgotten by some ancient god, lie the Silent 



104 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


Pools of Matabayo and the parklike lands that hold them 
Like a beautiful song in some tragic and gloomy opera, 
a regret of the God who created the hopeless forest, 
sheltered by the great n’sambya trees, they lie; pools of 
shadowy and tranquil water, broken by reflections of 
branches and mirroring spear-grass ten feet high and fan- 
like fern fronds. 

All was motionless and silent as a stereoscopic pic- 
ture; the rocketing palms bursting into sprays of emerald 
green, the n’sambyas with their trumpet-like yellow blos- 
soms, the fern fronds reduplicating themselves in the 
water’s glass, all and each lent their motionless beauty 
to the completion of the perfect picture. 

In the old days, long ago, before the land was exploited 
and the forest turned into a hunting ground for rubber, 
the lovely head of the oryx would push aside the long green 
blades of the speargrass; then, bending her lips to the 
lips of the oryx gazing up at her from the water, she would 
drink, shattering the reflection into a thousand ripples. 
The water-buck came here in herds from the elephant 
country away south, beyond the hour-glass-like constric- 
tion which divided the great forest, and the tiny dik-dik, 
smallest of all antelopes, came also to take its sip. But 
all that is past. The rifle and the trap, at the instigation of 
the devouring government that eats rubber and antelope, 
ivory and palm-oil, cassava and copal, has thinned out tile 
herds and driven them away. The “soldier” mus t be 
fed. Even the humble bush pig of the forest knows 
that fact. 

It was four years since Berselius had hunted in this 


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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


105 


country, and even in that short time he found enormous 
change. But he could not grumble. He was a share- 
holder in the company, and in twenty industries depend- 
ing on it. 

CJose up to the forest, where the m’bina trees showed 
{heir balls of scarlet blossom, lay the village they had come 
to reason with. There were twenty-five or more low huts 
pf wattle and mud, roofed with leaves and grass. No one 
was visible but an old woman, naked, all but for a slight 
covering about the loins. She was on all fours, grinding 
something between two stones, and as she sighted the party 
she looked backward over her shoulder at them like a 
frightened cat. 

She cried out in a chattering voice, and from the huts 
six others, naked as herself, came, stared at the whites, 
and then, as if driven bv the same impulse, and just like 
, rabbits, darted into the forest. 

But Meeus had counted on this, and had detached 
seven of his men to crawl round and post themselves 
; at the back of the huts amidst the trees. 

A great hullaballoo broke out, and almost immediately 
the soldiers appeared, driving the seven villagers before 
them with their rifle- b|ftts. 

They were not hurting them, just pushing them along, 
for this was, up to the present, not a punitive expedition 
but a fatherly visitation to point out the evils of laziness 
<aild insubordination, and to get, if possible, these poor 
wretches to communicate with the disaffected ones and 
make them return to their work. 

Adams nearly laughed outright at the faces of the 



106 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


villagers; black countenances drawn into all the contor- 
tions of fright, but the contortions of their bodies were 
more laughable still, as they came forward like naughty 
children, driven by the soldiers, putting their hands out 
behind to evade the prods of the gun butts. 

Berselius had ordered the tents to be raised on the 
sunlit grass, for the edge of the forest, though shady, 
was infested by clouds of tiny black midges — midges 
whose bite was as bad, almost, as the bite of a mosquito. 

Meeus spoke to the people in their own tongue, telling 
them not to be afraid, and when the tents were erected 
he and Berselius and Adams, sitting in the shelter of the 
biggest tent, faced the seven villagers, all drawn up in a 
row and backed by the eleven soldiers in their red fez caps. 

The villagers, backed by the soldiers and fronted bv 
Meeus, formed a picture which was the whole Congo 
administration in a nutshell. In a sentence, under- 
scored by the line of blood-red fezs. 

These seven undersized, downtrodden, hideously 
frightened creatures, with eyeballs rolling and the marks 
of old chain scars on their necks, were the represen- 
tatives of all the humble and meek tribes of the Congo, 
the people who for thousands of years had lived a lowly 
life, humble as the coneys of Scripture; people who had 
cultivated the art of agriculture and had carried eiviliza- 
tiou as far as their weak hands would carry it in that 
benighted land. Literally the salt of that dark earth. 
Very poor salt, it is true, but the best they could make 
of themselves. 

These eleven red-tipped devils, gun-butting the others 





























THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


1Q7 


to make them stand erect and keep in line, were the 
representatives of the warlike tribes who for thousands 
of years had preyed on each other and made the land a 
hell. Cannibals most of them, ferocious all of them, 
heartless to a man. 

Meeus was the white man who, urged by the black 
lust of money, had armed and drilled and brought under 
good pay all the warlike tribes of the Congo State and 
$et them as taskmasters over the humble tribes. 

Bv extension, Berselius and Adams were the nations 
of Europe looking on, one fully knowing, the other not 
quite comprehending the tragedy enacted before their 
eyes. 

I am not fond of parallels, but as these people have 
ranged themselves thus before my eyes, I cannot help 
pointing out the full meaning of the picture. A pic- 
ture which is photographically true. 

There was a little pot-bellied boy amongst the villagers, 
the old woman of the grindstone was holding him by the 
hand; he, of all the crowd, did not look in the least fright- 
ened. His eyeballs rolled, but they rolled in wonder. 

The tent seemed to take his fancy immensely; then 
the big Adams struck his taste, and he examined him 
from tip to toe. 

Adams, greatly taken with the blackamoor, puffed out 
his cheeks, closed one eye, and instantly, as if at the blow 
of a hatchet, the black face split t disclosing two white 
rows of teeth, and then hid itself, rubbing a snub nose 
against the old woman’s thigh. 

But a rolling white eyeball reappeared in a moment, 



108 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


only to vanish again as Adams, this time, sucked in his 
cheeks and worked his nose, making, under his sun hat, 
a picture to delight and terrify the heart of any child. 

All this was quite unobserved by the rest, and all this 
time Meeus gravely and slowly was talking to the vil- 
lagers in a quiet voice. They were to send one of their 
number into the forest to find the defaulters and urge 
them to return. Then all would be well. That was the 
gist of his discourse; and the wavering line of niggers 
rolled their eyes and answered, “We hear, we hear,” all 
together and like one person speaking, and they were 
nearly tumbling down with fright, for they knew that all 
would not be well, and that what the awful white man 
with the pale, grave face said to them was lies, lies, lies 
— all lies. 

Besides the old woman and the child there were two 
young girls, an old man, a boy of fifteen or so, with only 
one foot, and a pregnant woman very near her time. 

Adams had almost forgotten the nigger child when 
a white eyeball gazing at him from between the old 
woman’s legs recalled its existence. 

He thought he had never seen a jollier animal of the 
human tribe than that. The creature was so absolutely 
human and full of fun that it was difficult to believe it 
the progeny of these downtrodden, frightened looking 
folk. And the strange thing was, it had all the tricks of 
an English or American child. 

The hiding and peeping business, the ready laugh fol- 
lowed by bashfulness and self-effacement, the old unalter- 
able impudence, which is not least amidst the prima 


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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


109 


mobilia of the childish mind. In another moment, 
he felt, the thing would forget its respect and return 
his grimaces, so he ignored it and fixed his attention on 
Meeus and the trembling wretches he was addressing 

When the lecture was over they were dismissed, and 
the boy with the amputated foot was sent off to the forest 
to find the delinquents and bring them back. Till sun- 
rise on the following day was the term given him. 

If the others did not begin to return bv that time there 
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CHAPTER XIV 


BEHIND THE MASK 

T HE Silent Pools and the woods around were the 
haunts of innumerable birds. Rose-coloured 
flamingoes and gorgeous ducks, birds arrayed 
in all the jewellery of the tropics, birds not much bigger 
than dragon-flies, and birds that looked like flying beetles. 

When they had dined, Adams, leaving the others to 
smoke and take their siesta, went off by the water’s edge 
on a tour of the pools. They were three in number; 
sheets of water blue and tranquil and well-named, for 
surely in all the world nowhere else could such perfect 
peace be found. Perhaps it was the shelter of the 
forest pro'e?ting these windless sheets of water; perhaps 
it was the nature of the foliage, so triumphantly 
alive yet so motionless; perhaps beyond these some 
more recondite reason influenced the mind and stirred 
the imagination. Who knows? The spirit of the scene 
was there. The spirit of deep and unalterable peace, 
The peace of shadowy lagoons, the peace of the cedar 
groves where the sheltering trees shaded the loveliness 
of Merope, the peace of the heart which passes all undeiv 
standing and which men have named the peace of God. 
It was the first time since leaving Yandjali that Adams 
l HO 











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BEHIND THE MASK 


111 


had found himself alone and out of sight of his compan- 
ions. He breathed deeply, as if breathing in the air of free- 
dom, and as he strode along, tramping through the long 
grass, his mind, whilst losing no detail of the scene around 
him, was travelling far away, even to Paris, and beyond. 

Suddenly, twenty yards ahead, bounding and beautiful 
in its freedom and grace, a small antelope passed with 
the swiftness of an arrow; after it, almost touching it, 
came another form, yellow and fierce and flashing through 
the grass and vanishing, like the antelope, amidst the 
high grasses on the edge of the pool. 

The antelope had rushed to the water for protection, 
find the leopard had followed, carried forward by its 
impetus and ferocity, for Adams could hear its splash 
following the splash of the quarry; then a roar split 
the silence, echoed from the trees, and sent innumerable 
birds fluttering and crying from the edge of the forest 
and the edge of the pool. 

Adams burst through the long spear grass to see what 
was happening, and, standing on the boggy margin, hold- 
ing the grasses aside, gazed. 

The antelope had vanished as if it had never been, and 
a few yards from the shore, in the midst of a lather of 
water that seemed beaten up with a great swizzle-stick, 
the leopard’s head, mouth open, roaring, horrified his 
eyes for a moment and then was jerked under the surface. 

The water closed, eddied, and became still, and silence 
resumed her sway over the Silent Pools. 

Something beneath the water had devoured the ante- 
lope; something beneath the water had dragged the 





































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112 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


leopard to its doom, and swish! a huge flail tore the spear- 
grass to ribbons and sent Adams flying backward with 
the wind of its passage. 

Another foot and the crocodile’s tail would have swept 
him to the fate of the antelope and leopard. 

The place was alive with ferocity and horror, and it 
seemed to Adams that the Silent Pools had suddenly 
slipped the mask of silence and beauty and shown to him 
the face of hideous death. 

He wiped the sweat from his brow. He was unarmed, 
and it seemed that a man, to walk in safety through this 
Garden of Eden, ought to be armed to the teeth. He 
turned back to the camp, walking slowly and seeing 
nothing of the beauties around him, nothing but the 
picture of the leopard’s face, the paws frantically beating 
the water, and a more horrible picture still, the water 
resuming its calmness and its peace. 

When he reached the camp, he found Berselius and 
Meeus absent. After their siesta they had gone for a 
stroll by the water’s edge in the opposite direction to that 
which he had taken. The soldiers were on duty, keeping 
a watchful eye on the villagers; all were seated, the villag- 
ers in front of their huts and the soldiers in the shade, 
with their rifles handy; all, that is to say, except the nigger 
child, who was trotting about here and there, and who 
seemed quite destitute of fear or concern. 

When this creature saw the gigantic Adams who 
looked even more gigantic in his white drill clothes, it 
laughed and ran away, with 'hands outspread and head 
half slewed round. Then it hid behind a tree. There is 













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BEHIND THE MASK 


113 


nothing more charming than the flight of a child when it 
wishes to be pursued. It is the instinct of women and 
children to run away, so as to lead you on, and it is the 
instinct of a rightly constituted man to follow. Adams 
came toward the tree, and the villagers seated before 
their huts and the soldiers seated in the shade all turned 
their heads like automota to watch. 

“Hi there, you ink-bottle!” cried Adams. “Hullo 
there, you black dogaroo ! Out you come. Uncle Remus !” 
Then he whistled. 

He stood still, knowing that to approach closer would 
drive the dogaroo to flight or to tree climbing. 

There was nothing visible but two small black hands 
clutching the tree bole; then the golly wog face, absolutely 
split in two with a grin, appeared and vanished. 

Adams sat down. 

The old, old village woman who was, in fact, the child’s 
grandmother, had been looking on nervously, but when 
the big man sat down she knew he was only playing 
with the child, and she called out something in the native, 
evidently meant to reassure it. But she might have 
saved her breath, for the black bundle behind the tree 
suddenly left cover and stood with hands folded, looking 
at the seated man. 

He drew his watch from his pocket and held it up. It 
approached. He whistled, and it approached nearer. 
Two yards away it stopped dead. 

“ Tick-tick,” said Adams, holding up the watch. 

“Papeete N’quong,” replied the other, or words to 
that effect. 



114 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


It spoke in a hoarse, crowing voiee not at all unpleasant. 
If you listen to English children playing in the street 
you will often hear this croaking sort of voice, like the 
voice of a young rook. 

Papeete struck Adams as a good name for the animal 
and, calling him by it, he held out the watch as a bait. 

The lured one approached closer, held out a black 
claw, and next moment was seized by the foot. 

It rolled on the ground like a dog, laughing and kicking, 
and Adams tickled it; and the grim soldiers laughed, 
showing their sharp white teeth, and the old grand- 
mother beat her hands together, palm to palm, aS 
if pleased, and the other villagers looked on without the 
ghost of an expression on their black faces. 

Then he jumped it on its feet and sent it back to its 
people with a slap on its behind, and returned to his tent 
to smoke till Berselius and Meeus returned. 

But he had worked his own undoing, for, till they 
broke camp, Papeete haunted him like abuzz fly, peeping 
at him, sometimes from under the tent, trotting after him 
like a dog, watching him from a distance, till he began to 
think of “haunts” and “sendings” and spooks. 

When Berselius and his companion returned, the three 
men sat and smoked till supper time. 

At dark the villagers were driven into their huts and at 
the door of each hut lay a sentry. 

A big fire was lit, and bv its light two more sentries 
kept watch over the others and their prisoners. 1 hen the 
moon rose, spreading silver over the silence of the pools 
and the limitless foliage of the forest. 





CHAPTER XV 


THE PUNISHMENT 

T HE run rose, bring with it a breeze. Above the 
stir and bustle of the birds you could hear the 
gentle wind in the tree-tops like the sound of 
•a sea on a low tide beach. 

The camp was stjll in gloom, but the whole arc of sky 
sJ above the pools was thrilled and filled with living light. 
Sapphire blue, dazzling and pale, but deep with infinite 
distance, it had an intrinsic brilliancy as though filled 
with sunbeams brayed to dust. 

The palm tops had caught the morning splendour 
^nd then, rapidly, as though the armies of light were 
moving to imperious trumpet-calls, charging with golden 
^spears, legion on legion, a hurricane of brightness. Day 
broke upon the pools. 

We call it Day, but what is it, this splendour that comes 
from nowhere, and vanishes to nowhere, that strikes our 
lives rhythmically like the golden wing of a vast and flying 
bird, bearing us along with it in the wind of its flight ? 

The rotation of the earth ? But in the desert, on 
the sea, in the spaces of the forest you will see in the dawn 
suvision divorced from time, a recurring glance of a beauty 
that is eternal, a ray as if from the bright world toward 
































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116 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


which the great bird Time is flying, caught and reflected 
to our eyes by every lift of the wing. 

The dawn had not brought the truants back from the 
forest. 

This point Meeus carefully verified. Even the boy 
who had been sent to communicate with them had not 
returned, 

“No news ?” said Berselius, as he stepped from his tent- 
door and glanced around him. 

“None,” replied Meeus. 

Adams now appeared, and the servants who had been 
preparing breakfast laid it on the grass. The smell of 
coffee filled the air; nothing could be more pleasant than 
this out-of-doors breakfast in the bright and lovely morn- 
ing, the air fresh with the breeze and the voices of birds. 

The villagers were all seated in a group, huddled together 
at the extreme left of the row of huts. They were no 
longer free, but tied together ankle to ankle by strips of 
ngoji. Only Papeete was at liberty, but he kept at a 
distance. He was seated near the old woman, and he 
was exploring the interior of an empty tomato tin flung 
away by the cook. 

“I will give them two hours more,” said Meeus, as he 
sipped his coffee. 

“And then?” said Adams. 

Meeus was about to reply when he caught a glance 
from Berselius. 

“Then,” he said, “I will knock those mud houses of 
theirs to pieces. They require a lesson. " 

“Poor devils!” said Adams. 

































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THE PUNISHMENT 


117 


Meeus during the meal did not display a trace of 
irritation. From his appearance one might have judged 
that the niggers had returned to their work, and that 
everything was goiug well. At times he appeared absent- 
minded, and at times he wore a gloomy but triumphant 
look, as though some business which had unpleasant 
memories attached to it had at last been settled to his 
satisfaction. 

After breakfast he drew Berselius aside, and the two 
men walked away in the direction of the pools, leaving 
Adams to smoke his pipe in the shade of the tent. 

They came back in about half an hour, and Bersel- 
ius, after speaking a few words to Felix, turned to 
Adams. 

“I must ask you to return to Fort M'Bassa and get 
everything in readiness for our departure. Felix will 
accompany you. I will follow in a couple of hours with 
M. Meeus. I am afraid we will have to pull these people’s 
houses down. It ’s a painful duty, but it has to be per- 
formed. You will save yourself the sight of it.” 

“Thanks,” said Adams. Not for a good deal of money 
would he have remained to see those wretched hovels 
knocked to pieces. He could perceive plainly enough 
that the thing had to be done. Conciliation had been 
tried, and it was of no avail. He was quite on the side 
of Meeus; indeed, he had admired the self-restraint of 
this very much tried Chef de Poste. Not a hard word, 
not a blow, scarcely a threat had been used. The people 
had been spoken to in a fatherly manner, a messenger 
had been sent to the truants, and the messenger had joined 



9 


118 THE POOLS OF SILENCE 

them. At all events he had not returned. Then, cer- 
tainly, pull their houses down. But he did not wish to 
see the sight. He had nothing to do with the affair, so 
filling and lighting another pipe, and leaving all his belong- 
ings to be brought on by Berselius, he turned with Felix 
and, saying good-bye to his companions, started. 

They had nearly reached the edge of the forest when 
shouts from behind caused Adams to turn his head. 

The soldiers were shouting to Papeete to come back. 

The thing had trotted after Adams like a black dog. 
It was within a few yards of him. 

“Go back,” shouted Adams. 

“Tick-tick,” replied Papeete. It was the only English 
the creature knew. 

It stood frying in the sum grinning and glistening, till 
Adams, with an assumption of ferocity, made for it, then 
back it went, and Adams, laughing, plunged under the 
veil of leaves. 

Berselius, seated at his tent door, looked at his watch. 
Meeus, seated beside Berselius, was smoking cigarettes. 

“Give him an hour.” said Berselius. “He will be far 
away enough by that. Besides, the wind is blowing from 
there.” 

“True,” said Meeus. “An hour.” And he continued 
to smoke. But his hand was shaking, and he was biting 
the cigarette, and his lips were dry so that he had to be 
continually licking them. 

Berselius was quite calm, but his face was pale, and 
he seemed contemplating something at a distance. 

When half an hour had passed, Meeus rose suddenly to 























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THE PUNISHMENT 


119 


his.feet and began to walk about, up and down, in front of 
the. tent, up and down, up and down, as a man walks 
when he is in distress of mind. 

The black soldiers also seemed uneasy, and the villagers 
huddled closer together like sheep. Papeete alone 
seemed undisturbed. He was playing now with the old 
tomato tin, out of which he had scraped and licked even 
vestige of contents. 

Suddenly Meeus began crying out to the soldiers in a 
hard, sharp voice like the yelping of a dog. 

The time was up, and the soldiers knew. They ranged 
up, chattering and laughing, and all at once, as if pro- 
duced from nowhere, two rhinoceros hide whips appeared 
in the hands of two of the tallest of the blacks. 
Rhinoc* ro; hide is more than an inch thick; it is clear and 
almost translucent when properly prepared. In the form 
of a whip it is less an instrument of punishment than a 
weapon. These whips were not the smoothly prepared 
whips used for light punishment; they had angles that 
cut like sword edges. One wonders what those senti- 
mental people would say — those sentimental people who 
cry out if a burly ruffian is ordered twenty strokes with the 
cat — could they see a hundred chicotte administered 
with a whip that is flexible as india rubber, hard as steel. 

Two soldiers at the yelping orders of Meeus cut the old 
woman apart from her fellows and flung her on the ground. 

The two soldiers armed with whips came to her, and 
«he did not speak a word, nor cry out, but lay grinning at 
ithe sun. 

Papeete ? seeing his old grandmother treated like this, 

































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J20 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


dropped his tomato tin and screamed, till a soldier put a 
foot on his chest and held him down. 

“Two hundred chicotte ,” cried M^eus, and like the echo 
of his words came the first dull, coughing blow. 

The villagers shrieked and cried altogether at each 
blow, but the victim, after the shriek which followed the 
first blow, was dumb. 

Free as a top which is being whipped by a boy, she 
gyrated, making frantic efforts to escape, and like boys 
whipping a top, the two soldiers with their whips pur- 
sued her, blow following blow. 

A semicircle of blood on the ground marked her gyra- 
tions. Once she almost gained her feet, but a blow in the 
face sent her down again. She put her hands to her poor 
face, and the rhinoceros whips caught her on the hands, 
breaking them. She flung herself on her back and they 
beat her on the stomach, cutting through the walls of the 
abdomen till the intestines protruded. She flung herself 
on her face and they cut into her back with the whips 
till her ribs were bare and the fat bulged through the 
long slashes in the skin. 

Verily It was a beating to the bitter end, and Meeus, 
pale, dripping with sweat, his eyes dilated to a rim, ran 
about laughing, shouting — 

“ Two hundred chicotte. Two hundred chicotte 

He cried the words like a parrot, not knowing what he 
said. 

And Berselius ? 

Berselius, also dripping with sweat, his eyes also dilated 



THE PUNISHMENT 


121 


to a rim, tottering like a drunken man, gazed, drinking, , 
drinking the sight in. 

Down, away down in the heart of man there is a trap- 
door. Beyond the instincts of murder and assassination, 
beyond the instincts that make a Count Cajus or a Mar- 
quis de Sade, it lies, and it leads directly into the last and 
nethermost depths of hell, where sits in eternal damnation 
Ecceliu de Romano. 

Cruelty for cruelty’s sake: the mad pleasure of watch- 
ing suffering in its most odious form: that is the passion 
which hides demon-like beneath this door, and that was 
the passion that held Berselius now in its grip. 

He had drunk of all things, this man, but never of such 
a potent draught as this demon held now to his lips — and 
not'- for the first time. The draught would have been 
nothing but for the bitterness of it, the horror of it, the 
mad delight of knowing the fiendishness of it, and drinking 

O o o 

drinking, drinking, till reason, self-respect, and soul, were 
overthrown. 

The thing that had been a black woman and, now, 
seemed like nothing earthly except a bundle of red rags, 
gave up the miserable soul it contained and, stiffening 
in the clutches of tetanus, became a hoop. 

What happened then to the remaining villagers could 
be heard echoing for miles through the forest in the shrieks 
and wails of the tortured ones. 

One cannot write of unnamable things, unprintable 
deeds. The screams lasted till noon. 

At 'one o’clock the punitive; expedition had departed, 































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122 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


leaving the Silent Pools to their silence. The houses of 
the village had been destroyed and trampled out. The 
sward lay covered with shapeless remains, and scareelv 
had the last of the expedition departed, staggering and 
half drunk with the delirium of their deeds, than from the 
blue above, like a stone, dropped a vulture. 

A vulture drops like a stone, with wings closed till it 
reaches within a few yards of the ground; then it spreads 
its wings and, with wide-opened talons, lights on its prev. 

Then, a marabout with fore-slanting legs and domed- 
out wings, came sailing silently down to the feast, and 
another vulture, and yet another. 






































































































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CHAPTER XVI 


DUE SOUTH r 

W HEN Berselius and Meeus returned to Fort 
M’Bassa Adams, who met them, came to the 
conclusion that Berselius had been drinking. 
The man’s face looked stiff and bloated, just as a man’s 
face looks after a terrible debauch. Meeus looked cold 
and hard and old, but his eyes were bright and he was 
seemingly quite himself. 

“To-morrow I shall start,’’ said Berselius. “Not 
to-day. I am tired and wish to sleep.” He went off 
to the room where his bed was, and cast himself on it and 
fell instantly into a deep and dreamless sleep. 

The innocent may wonder how such a man would 
dare to sleep — dare to enter that dark country so close 
to the frontier of death. But what should the innocent 
know of a Berselius, who was yet a living man and walked 
the earth but a few years ago, and whose prototype is 
alive to-day. Alive and powerful and lustful, great in 
mind, body, and estate. 

Before sunrise next morning the expedition was mar- 
shalled in the courtyard for the start. 

A great fire burned in the space just before the house, 
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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


and by its light the stores and tents were taken from the 
go-down. The red light of the fire lit up the black 
glistening skins of the porters as they loaded themselves 
with the chop boxes and tents and guns: lit up the red 
fez caps of the onlooking “soldiers,” their glittering 
white teeth, their white eyeballs, and the barrels of their 
rifles. 

Beyond and below the fort the forest stretched in the 
jiving starlight like an infinite white sea. The tree-tops 
were roofed with a faint mist, no breath of wind disturbed 
it, and in contrast to the deathly stillness of all that dead- 
white world the sky, filled with leaping stars, seemed alive 
and vocal. 

It was chill up here just before dawn. Hence the fire. 
Food had been served out to the porters* and they ate it 
whilst getting things ready and loading up. Berselius 
and his companions were breakfasting in the guest house 
and the light of the paraffin lamp lay on the veranda 
yellow as topaz in contrast with the red light of the fire 
in the yard. 

Everything was ready for the start. They were waiting 
now for the sun. 

Then, away to the east, as though a vague azure wind 
had blown up under the canopy of darkness, the sky, 
right down to the roof of the forest, became translucent 
and filled with distance. 

A reef of cloud like a vermilion pencil-line materialized 
itself, became a rose-red feather tipped with dazzling 
gold, and dissolved as if washed away by the rising sea 
of light 






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A great bustle spread through the courtyard. The 
remaining stores were loaded up, and under the direction 
of Felix* the porters formed in a long line, their loads on 
their heads. 

As the expedition left the compound it was already 
day. The edge of the sun had leaped over the edge of 
the forest, the world was filled with light, and the sky was 
a sparkling blue. 

What a scene that was! The limitless sea of snow- 
white mist rippled over by the sea of light, the mist 
billowed and spiralled by the dawn wind, great palm tops 
bursting through the haze, glittering effulgent with dew, 
birds breaking to the sky in coloured flocks, snow, and 
light, and the green of tremendous vegetation, and over 
all, new built and beautiful, the blue, tranquil dome of sky. 

It was song materialized in colour and form, the song 
of the primaeval forests breaking from the mists of chaos, 
tremendous, triumphant, joyous, finding day at last, and 
greeting him with the glory of the palms, with the 
rustle of the n’sambyas tossing their golden bugles 
to the light, the drip and sigh of the euphorbia trees, the 
broad-leaved plantains and the thousand others whose 
forms hold the gloom of the forest in the mesh of their 
leaves. 

“I have awakened, O God! I have awakened. Behold 
tne, O Lord! I am Thine!” 

Thus to the splendour of the sun and led by the trumpet 
of the wind sang the forest. A hundred million trees 
lent their voices to the song. A hundred million trees 

acacia and palm, m’bina and cottonwood, thorn and 


































































































































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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


mimosa; in gloom, in shine, in valley and on rise, mist- 
strewn and sun-strieken. all bending under the deep sweet 
billows of the wind. 

At the edge of the forest Berselius and Adams took 
leave of Meeus. Neither Berselius nor Meeus showed, 
any sign of the past day. They had “slept it off.” As 
for Adams, he knew nothing, except that the villagers had 
been punished and their houses destroyed. 

The way lay due south. They were now treading 
that isthmus of woods which connects the two great forests 
which, united thus, make the Forest of M’Bonga. [The 
trees in this vast connecting wood are different from the 
trees in the main forests. You find here enormous acacias , 
monkey-bread trees, raphia palms and baobabs; less 
gloom, and fewer creeping and hanging plants. 

Berselius, as a rule, brought with him a taxidermist , 
bu^ this expedition was purely for sport. The tusks 
of whatever elephants were slain would be brought back, 
but no skins; unless, indeed, they were fortunate enough 
to find some rare or unknown species. 

















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CHAPTER XVII 


SUN-WASHED SPACES 

A T WO days’ march brought them clear of the 
woods and into a broken country, vast, sunstrewn 
and silent; a beautiful desolation where the 
tall grass waved in the wind, and ridge and hollow, plain 
and mimosa tree, led the eye beyond, and beyond, to 
everlasting space. 

Standing here alone, and listening, the only sound 
from all that great sunlit country was the sound of the 
wind in the grasses near by. 

Truly this place was at the very back of the world, the 
hinterland of the primaeval forests. Strike eastward far 
enough and you would sight the snow-capped crest of 
Kilimanjaro, King of African mountains, sitting snow- 
crowned above the vast territory to which he has given 
his name, and which stretches from Lake Evasi to the 
Pare Mountains. The hunters of Kilimanjaro, which 
once was the home of elephants, have thinned the herds 
and driven them to wander. Elephants that a hundred 
years ago, even fifty years ago, were almost fearless of 
man, have altered their habits from the bitter lessons they 
have received, and now are only to be found in the most 
inaccessible places. Should they cling to more inhabited 

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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


districts, they come out of the sheltered places only bv 
night. A man may spend years in an elephant district 
without once seeing an elephant. Driven by the necessity 
of food and the fear of man, the great herds wander in 
their wonderful and mysterious journeys for hundreds and 
hundreds of miles. Never lying down, sleeping as they 
stand, always on guard, dim of sight yet keen of smell, 
they pass where there are trees, feeding as they go, strip- 
ping branches of leaves. Alarmed, or seeking a new feed- 
ing place, a herd moves in the rainy season, when 
the ground, is soft, with the silence and swiftness of 
a cloud shadow; in the dry season when the ground is 
hard, the sound of them stampeding is like the drums of 
an army. 

“Elephants,” said Berselius, pointing to some bundles 
of dried stuff lying near a vangueria bush. “That stuff is 
a bundle of bowstring hemp. They chew it and drop it. 
Oh, that has been dropped a long time ago; see, there you 
have elephants again.” 

A tree standing alone showed half its bark ripped off, 
tusked off by some old bull elephant, and above the tusk 
marks, some fifteen feet ilp, could be seen the rubbing 
mark where great shoulders had scratched themselves. 

As they marched* making due south, Berselius in that 
Cold manner which never left him, and which made com- 
radeship with the man impossible and reduced compan- 
ionship to the thinnest bond, talked to Adams about the 
game they were after, telling in a few graphic sentences 
and not without feeling the wonderful story of the moving 
herds, to whom distance is nothing, to whom mountains 










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SUN- WASHED SPACES 


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are nothing, to whom the thickest jungle is nothing. The 
poem of the children of the mammoth who have walked 
the earth with the mastodon, who have stripped the trees 
wherein dwelt arboreal man, who have wandered under 
the stars and suns of a million years, seen rivers change 
their courses and hills arise where plains had been, and 
yet remain, far strewn and thinned out, it is true, but 
living still. At noon they halted and the tents were pitched 
for a four hours’ rest. 

Adams, whilst dinner was preparing, walked away 
by himself till the camp was hidden by a ridge, then he 
stood and looked around him. 

Alone, like this, the spirit of the scene appeared before 
him: the sun, and wind, and sky; the vast, vast spaces 
of waving grass, broken by the beds of dried-up streams, 
strewn here and there with mimosas and thorns, here dim 
with the growth of vangueria bushes, here sharp and 
gray green with cactus; this giant land, infinite, sunlit, 
and silent, spoke to him in a new language. 

It seemed to Adams that he had never known freedom 
before. 

A shadow swept by him on the grass. He looked 
up and watched the great bird that had cast the shadow 
sailing away on the wind, dwindling to a point, and vanish- 
ing in the dazzling blue. 








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CHAPTER XVIII 


FAR INTO ELEPHANT LAND 

T HEY sighted a small herd of giraffe two days 
later, but so far off as to be beyond pursuit; 
but before evening, just as they were about to 
camp by some pools, they came across rhino. 

Berselius’s quick eye spotted the beasts, a bull and a 
cow. They were in the open, under shelter of some thick 
grass i the bull was half sitting up, and his head and horn 
in the evening light might have been taken for the stump of 
a broken tree. The cow was not visible at first, but almost 
immediately after they sighted the bull, she heaved herself 
up and stood a silhouette against the sky. 

The wind was blowing from the beasts, so it was quite 
possible to get close up to them. The meat would be 
Useful, so Berselius and his companion started, with 
Felix carrying the guns. 

As they drew close Adams noticed that the back of 
the great cow seemed alive and in motion. Half a dozen 
rhinoceros birds, in fact, were Upon it, and almost imme- 
diately, sighting the hunters, they rose chattering and 
fluttering in the air. 

These birds are the guardians of the half-blind rhino- 
ceros. They live on the parasites that infest his skin, 

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It is a partnership. The birds warn the rhinoceros of 
danger, and he, vicariously, feeds the birds. Scarcely 
had the birds given warning than the bull heaved himself 
up. Berselius’s rifle rang out, but the light was uncertain, 
and the brute wounded, but not mortally, charged forward 
took a half circle, swung his head from side to side in 
search of his assailant, and sighted the cow. Instantly, 
horn down and squealing, he charged her. She met 
him horn to horn, and the smash could be heard at the 
camp where the porters and the soldiers stood gazing 
^open-mouthed at the battle between the two great brutes 
charging each other in the low evening light, fighting with 
jthe ferocity of tigers and the agility of cats. 

Adams, close up as he was, had a better view, and 
^unless he had seen with his own eyes, he could not have 
believed that two animals so heavy and unwieldy 
could display such nimbleness and such quickness of 
ferocity. 

It was the wickedest sight, and it was brought to an 
end at last by the rifle of Berselius. 

Curiously enough, neither brute had injured the other 
very much. The horns which, had they been of ivory * 
must have been shivered, were intact, for the horn of a 
rhinoceros is flexible; it is built up of a conglomeration 
of hairs, and though, perhaps, the most unbreakable thing 
in the universe, it bends up to a certain point just as a 
rapier does. 

Next morning, two hours after daybreak, Felix, who 
was scouting just ahead of the column, Came running 
back with news he had struck eleph&nt spoor. Every 








































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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


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tooth in his head told the tale. Not only spoor, but the 
spoor of a vast herd cutting right across the line of march. 

Berselius came forward to examine, and Adams came 
with him. 

The dry ground and wire grass was not the best medium 
for taking the track of the beasts, but to the experienced 
eyes of Berselius and the Zappo Zap everything was clear. 
A herd of elephant had passed not long ago, and they 
were undisturbed and unsuspicious. When elephants 
are suspicious they march in lines, single file, one stepping 
in the tracks of another. This herd was spread wide and 
going easy of mind, but at what pace it would be impossible 
to say. 

The long boat-shaped back feet of the bulls leave a 
print unmistakable in the rainy season when the ground 
is soft, but still discernible to the trained eye in the dry 
season. Felix declared that there were at least twenty 
bulls in the herd, and some of huge size. 

“How long is it since they passed here?” asked 
Berselius. 

Felix held up the fingers of one handv From certain 
indications he came to the conclusion they had passed late 
in the night, three hours or so before daybreak. They 
numbered forty or fifty, leaving aside the calves that might 
be with them. He delivered these opinions, speaking in 
the native, and Berselius instantly gave the order, “Left 
wheel !” to the crowd of porters; and at the word the 
long column turned at right angles to the line of march 
and struck due west, treading the track of the herd. 

Nothing is more exciting than this following in the 





FAR INTO ELEPHANT LAND 


133 


track of a mammoth army whose tactics you cannot fore- 
see. This herd might be simply moving a few miles in 
search of a new feeding ground, or it might be making one 
of those great sweeping marches covering hundreds of 
miles that the mysterious elephant people make at the 
dictates of their mysterious instinct. It might be moving 
at a gentle pace, or swifter than a man could run. A 
mile on the new route they came on a broken tree, 
a great tree broken down as if by a storm, the fractures 
were quite recent. The elephant folk had done this. 
They came across another tree whose sides, facing north 
and south, had been clearly barked, and the pieces of the 
bark, farther on, that had been chewed and flung away. 

With one stroke of a tusk passing a tree, and without 
stopping, an elephant will tear off a strip of bark; and 
it was curious to see how the bark of this tree to east and 
west was intact. The moving herd had not stopped. 
Just in passing, an elephant on either side of the tree had 
taken his slice of bark, chewed it and flung it away. 
There were also small trees trodden down mercilessly 
under foot. Thus the great track of the herd lay 
before the hunters, but not a sign in all the sunlit, silent 
country before them of the herd itself. 

It was Berselius’s aim to crowd up his men as quickly 
as a forced march could do it, camp and then pursue the 
herd with a few swift followers, the barest possible amount 
of stores and one tent. 

The calabashes and the water bottles had been filled 
at the last halt, but it was desirable to find water for the 
evening’s camping place. 







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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


It was now that Berselius showed his capacity as a 
driver and his own enormous store of energy. 

He took the tail of the column, and woe to the porters 
who lagged behind ! Felix was with him, and Adams, who 
was heading the column, could hear the shouts of the 
Zappo Zap. The men with their loads went at a quick 
walk, sometimes breaking into a trot, urged forward by 
the gun-butt of Felix. 

^The heat was sweltering, but there was no rest. Oh, on; 
on, ever on through a country that changed not at all; 
the same breaks and ridges, the same limitless plains of 
waving grass, the same scant trees, the same heat-shaken 
horizon toward which the elephant road led straight, 
Unwavering, endless. 

The brain reeled with the heat and the dazzle, but 
the columrt halted not nor stayed. The energy of Berselius 
drove it forward as the energy of steam drives an engine. 
His voice* his very presence, put life into flagging legs 
and sight into dazzled eyes. He spared neither himself 
nor others; the game was ahead, the spoor was hot, and 
the panther in his soul drove him forward. 

Toward noon they halted for two hours where some 
bushes spread their shade. The porters lav down on their 
bellies, with arms outspread, having taken a draught of 
Water and a bite of food; they lay in absolute and pro- 
found slumber. Adams, nearly as exhausted, lav on his 
back. Even Felix showed signs of the journey, but 
Berselius sat right back into the bushes, with his knees 
drawn up and, with eyes fixed on the eastern distance, 
brooded. 
















































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FAR INTO ELEPHANT LAND 


135 


He was always like this on a great hunt, when the game 
was near. Silent and brooding, and morose to the point 
of savagery. 

One might almost have fancied that in far distant davs 
this man had been a tiger^ and that the tiger still lived 
slumbering in his soul, triumphant over death, driving 
him forth at intervals from civilization to wander in the 
wild places of the earth and slay. 

Two hours past noon they resumed their journey: on, 
on, on, treading the elephant track which still went due 
east straight as an arrow to the blue horizon. The fright- 
ful tiredness they had felt before the noonday halt had 
passed, giving place to a dull, dreamy feeling, such as 
comes after taking opium. The column marched mechan- 
ically and without thought, knowing only two things, the 
feel of the hard ground and grass beneath their feet, and 
the smiting of the sun on their backs. 

Thus the galley slaves of old laboured at their oars and 
the builders of the pyramids beneath their loads, all 
moving like one man. But here was no tune of flutes 
to set the pace, or monotonous song to help the lifting; 
only the voice of Berselius like a whip-lash, and the gun- 
butt of Felix drumming on the ribs of laggards. 

A light, hot wind was blowing in their faces. Adams, 
still at the head of the column, had suffered severely dur- 
ing the morning march, and the re-start after the noon 
rest was painful to him as a beating; but the reserve forces 
of a powerful constitution that had never been tampered 
with were now coming into play, and, after a time, he feit 
little discomfort. His body-, like a woiind-ilp mechanism, 


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136 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


did all the work; his mind became divorced from it; he 
experienced a curious exaltation, like that which comes 
from drink, only finer far and more ethereal. The column 
seemed marching far swifter than it was marching in 
reality, the vast sunlit land seemed vaster even than it 
was; the wind-blown grass, the far distant trees, the 
circling skyline, all spoke of freedom unknown to man: 
the freedom of the herd they were pursuing; the freedom 
of the bird flying overhead; the freedom of the wind blow- 
ing in the grass; the freedom of the limitless, endless, 
Sunlit country. , Meridians of silence, and light, and 
.plains, and trees, and mountains, and forests. Parallels 
of virgin land. 

He was feeling what the bird knows and feels when L it 
beats up the mountains or glides down the vales of air; 
what the elephant herd knows and feels when it moves 
over mountains and across plains; what the antelopes 
know when distance calls them. 

A shout from Felix, and the Zappo Zap came running 
up the line; his head was flung up and he was sniffing the 
air. Then, walking beside Adams, he stared ahead right 
away over the country before them to the far skyline. 

“Elephant smell/’ he replied, when Adams asked him 
what was the matter; then, turning, he shouted 
Some words in the native back to Berselius, and tramped on 
beside Adams, his nose raised to the wind, of which each 
puff brought the scent stronger. 

Adams could smell nothing, but the savage could tell 
that right ahead there were elephants; close up, too, yet 
not a sign of them could be seen. 






FAR INTO ELEPHANT LAND 137 

This puzzled him, and what puzzles a savage frightens 
him. 

His nose told him that here were elephants in sight of 
his eyes; his eyes told him that there were none. 

All at once the column came to a dead halt. Porters 
flung down their loads and cried out in fright. Even 
Berselius stood stock-still in astonishment. 

From the air, blown on the wind from no visible source, 
came the shrill trumpeting of an elephant. 

There, in broad daylight, close up to them, the sound 
came with the shock of the supernatural. Nothing stirred 
Jn all the land but the grass bending to the wind. There 
was not even a bird in the air; yet close to them an elephant 
was trumpeting shrilly and fiercely as elephants trumpet 
when they charge. 

Again came the sound, and once again, but this time it 
broke lamentably to a complaint that died away to silence. 

Instantly the Zappo Zap came to himself. He knew 
that sound. An elephant was dying somewhere nearby, 
caught in a trap possibly. He rushed down the line, gun- 
butting the porters back to their places, shouting to 
Berselius, helping loads up on the heads of the men 
who had dropped them, so that in a minute the column 
was in motion again and going swiftly to make up for 
lost time. 

Five minutes brought them to a slight rise in the ground, 
beyond which, deep-cut, rock-strewn and skeleton-dry, 
lay the bed of a river. 

In the rains this would be scarcely fordable, but now 
hot even a trickle of water could be seen. On the flooi* 







































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of this river-bed, like a huge dark *rock, lay the body of 
an elephant. 

An African elephant is the biggest creature on earth, 
far bigger than his Indian cousin, and far more formidable 
looking. Adams could scarcely believe that the thing 
before him was the body of an animal, as he contrasted 
its size with Felix, who had raced down the slope and was 
examining the carcass. 

“Dead!” cried Felix, and the porters, taking hearts 
descended, but not without groaning and lamentations, 
for it is well-known to the natives that whoever comes 
across an elephant lying down must die, speedily and by 
violent means; and this elephant was lying down in very 
truth, his tusks humbly lowered to the ground, his great 
ears motionless, just as death had left him. 

It was a bull and surely, from his size, the father of the 
herd. Berselius considered the beast to be of great age. 
One tusk was decayed badly and the other was chipped 
and broken, and on the skin of the side were several of 
those circular sores one almost always finds on the body 
of a rhinoceros, “dundos,” as the natives call them; old 
scars and wounds told their tale of old battles and the 
wanderings of many years. 

It might have been eighty or a hundred years since 
the creature had first seen the light and started on its 
wonderful journey over mountains and plains through 
jungle and forest, lying down may be only twenty times in 
all those years, wandering hither and thither, and know- 
ing not that every step of its journey was a step closer 
to here. 





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FAR INTO ELEPHANT LAND k 139 

Just this little piece of ground on which it lay hqd been 
plotted out for it a hundred years ago, and it had gome to 
it by a million mazy paths, but not less surely than had it 
followed the leading of a faultlessly directed arrow. 

The herd had left it here to die. Berselius, examining 
the body closely, could find no wound. He concluded 
that it had come to its end just as old men come to their 
end at last — the mechanism had failed, hindered, per- 
haps, by some internal disease, and it had lain down to 
wait for death. 

The tusks were not worth taking, and the party pur- 
sued it way up the eastern bank of the river, where the 
herd had also evidently pursued its way and then on, on, 
across the country due east, in the track they had followed 
since morning. 

As they left the river bed a tiny dot in the sky above^ 
which they had not noticed, enlarged, and like a stone 
from the blue fell a vulture. It lit on the carcass; then 
came a kite slanting down to the feast, and then from the 
blue, like stones dropped from the careless hand of a 
giant, vulture after vulture. 









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CHAPTER XIX 


THE GREAT HERD 

F ELIX kept his place beside Adams at the head 
of the column. The black seemed morose, and 
at the same time, excited. 

Two things had disturbed him: the bad luck of meet- 
ing a lving-down elephant and the fact that a giraffe 
was with the herd. He had spotted giraffe spoor in the 
river bed where the ground was sandy and showed up 
the impression well. 

Now, the giraffe has the keen eyesight of a bird, and 
when he throws in his lot with the elephant folk who. 
though half-blind, have the keen scent of hounds, the 
combination is bad for the hunter. 

An hour before sundown they struck some pools beside 
which grew a tree, the biggest they had yet come 
across, and here Berselius gave the order, halt and camp. 

To half of the porters it was an order to fall down 
flat, their loads beside them, their arms outspread abso- 
lutely broken with the weariness of the march, broken, 
and speechless, and motionless, and plunged into such a 
depth of slumber* that had you kicked them they would 
hot have moved; 

Berselius, himself, was nearly exhausted; He sat with 
140 

































































































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THE GREAT HERD 


141 


his back against the tree and gave his orders in a languid 
voice, and it was very curious to see the tents going up, 
wielded by men who seemed working in their sleep, 
slowly and with fumbling fingers, tripping over each other, 
pausing, hesitating, yet working all the same, and all in 
the still level light of evening that lent unreality to the 
scene. 

Luck was against Berselius. It was quite within the 
bounds of probability that the herd might have halted 
here by the water for the night; but they had not. They 
had drunk here, for the pool was all trodden up and still 
muddy, and then gone on. 

They were evidently making one of their great marches, 
and it was probable now that they would never be caught 
up with. Under these circumstances, Berselius deter- 
mined to halt for the night. 

Some small trees and bushes were cut to make a camp 
fire, and when they had finished supper Berselius, still 
with his back to the tree> sat talking to Adams bv the 
light of the crackling branches. 

He did not seem in the least put out with his failure, 

“The rains will be on Us in a week or two,” said he, 
“Then you will see elephants all over this place. They 
lie up in the inaccessible places in the dry season, but 
when the wet weather comes the herds spread over the 
plains. Not such herds as the one we have been fol- 
lowing — it is rarely one Comes across one like that. 
However, to-morrow we may have better luck with them. 
Felix tells me that forty miles beyond there, where they 
have gone, there are a lot of tteCS. They may stop and 




142 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


feed, and if they do, we will have them. To-morrow 
I shall start light. Leave the main camp here. You 
and I and Felix, and four of the best of those men, and 
the smallest tent, enough stores for three or four days. 

Yes, to-morrow ” The man dozed off, sleep-stricken, 

the pipe between his teeth. 

“ To-morrow !” Portentous word ! 

They retired to their tents. Two sentries were pasted 
to keep the fire going and to keep watch. The porters 
lay about, looking just like men who had fallen in battle, 
and after awhile the sentries, having piled the fire with 
wood; sat down, and the moon rose, flooding the whole 
wide land with light. 

She had scarcely lifted her own diameter above the 
horizon when the sentries; flat on their backs, with arms 
extended; were sleeping as soundly as the others. Bril- 
liant almost as daylight; still and peaceful as death, 
the light of the great moon flooded the land, paling the 
stars and casting the shadow of the tents across the 
sleepers, and the wind, which was now blowing from the 
West, shook the twigs of the tree, like skeleton fingers, 
over the flicker of the red burning camp-fire. 

Now, the great herd of elephants had been making, 
as Berselius imagined possible, for the forest that lay 
forty miles to the east. 

They had reached it before sundown, and had begun 
to feed, stripping branches of their leaves, the enor- 
mous trunks reaching up like snakes and whirling the 
leaves Catherine-wheel like down enormous throats; the 
purring and grumbling of their cavernous bellies, the 


































































































































































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THE GREAT HERD 


143 


rubbing of rough shoulders against the bark, the stamp- 
ing of feet crushing the undergrowth, resounded in echoes 
amongst the trees. The big bull giraffe that had cast 
its lot in with the herd was busy, too, tearing and snap- 
ping down twigs and leaves, feeding like the others, who 
were all feeding like one, even to the eighteen-month- 
old calves busy at the teats of their enormous dams 

The sunlight, level and low, struck the wonderful 
picture. Half the herd were in the wood, and you could 
see the tree branches bending and shaking to the reach- 
ing trunks. Half the herd were grazing on the wood’s 
edge, the giraffe amidst them, its clouded body burning 
in the sunset against the green of the trees. 

The wind was blowing steadily along the edge of the 
wood and against a band of hunters of the Congo State, 
blacks armed with rifles, who were worming their way 
along from tree bole to tree bole, till within shooting dis- 
tance of the bull elephant nearest to them. 

The creatures feeding knew nothing of their danger 
till three shots, that sounded like one, rang out, and the 
bull struck in the neck, the shoulder, and between the 
ear and eye, fell, literally all of a heap, as though some 
giant’s scimitar had swept its legs away from under it* 

At this moment the sun’s lower edge had just touched 
the horizon. The whole visible herd on the edge of the 
wood, at the sound of the shots and the crash of the fall- 
ing bull, wheeled, trumpeted wildly, and with trunks 
swung up, ears spread wide, swept away toward the 
sunset, following the track by which they had come; 
whilst, bursting from the woods, leaf-streWn, with green 


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144 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


branches tangled in their tusks, furious and mad with 
fright, came the remainder, following in the same track, 
sweeping after the others, and filling the air with the 
thunder of their stampede. 

Shot after shot rang out, but not an elephant was 
touched, and in two great clouds, which coalesced the 
broken herd with the sound of a storm passed away 
along the road they had come by, the night closing on 
them as the sun vanished from the sky. 

Berselius had not reckoned on this. No man can 
reckon on what the wilderness will do. The oldest 
hunter is the man who knows most surely the dramatic 
surprises of the hunt, but the oldest hunter would never 
have taken this into his calculations. 

Here, back along the road they had travelled all day, 
was coming, not a peacefully moving herd, but a storm 
of elephants. Elephants who had been disturbed in 
feeding, shot at, and shot after, filled with the dull fury 
that dwells in an elephant’s brain for days, and with the 
iustinct for safety that would carry them perhaps a hun- 
dred miles before dawn. 

And right in the track of this terrible army of de- 
struction lay the sleeping camp, the camp fire smouldering 
and fluttering its flames on the wind. 

And the wind had shifted ! 

With the dark, as though the scene had been skilfully 
prepared by some infernal dramatist, just as the cover of 
night shut down tight and sealed, and suddenly, like a 
box-lid that had been upheld by the last rays of the set- 
ting sun, just as the great stars burst out above as if at 




























































































































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THE GREAT HERD 


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the touch of an electric button, the wind shifted right 
round and blew due east. 

This change of wind would dull the sound of the oncom- 
ing host to the people at the camp; at the same time it 
jvould bring the scent of the human beings to the elephants. 

The effect of this might be to make them swerve away 
from the line they were taking, but it would be impos- 
sible to tell for certain. The only sure thing was, that 
if they continued in their course till within eyeshot of the 
camp fire, they would charge it and destroy everything 
round about it In their fury. 

A camp fire to an angry elephant is the equivalent 
of a red rag to a bull. 

Thus the dramatic element of uncertainty was intro- 
duced into the tragedy unfolding on the plains, and the 
great stars seemed to leap like expectant hearts of fire 
till the moon broke over the horizon, casting the flying 
shadows of the great beasts before them. 

The first furious stampede had settled into a rapid 
trot, to a sound like the sound of a hundred muffled drums 
beating a rataplan. 

Instinct told the herd that immediate danger was 
past, also that for safety they would have to cover an 
immense space of country; so they settled to the pace 
most suitable for the journey. And what a pace it was, 
and what a sight! 

Drifting across the country before the great white 
moon, fantastic beasts and more fantastic shadows, 
in three divisions line ahead, with the lanes of moon- 
light ruled between each line; calves by the cows > 


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146 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


bulls in the van, they went, keeping' to the scent of the 
track they had come bv as unswervingly as a train keeps 
to the metals. 

The giraffe was still with them. He and his shadow, 
gliding with compass-like strides a hundred yards awav 
from the southward column; and just as the scent of the 
camp came to his mammoth friends, the sight of the 
camp fire, like a red spark, struck his keen eyes. 

With a rasping note of warning he swerved to the south. 

Now was the critical moment. Everything lay with the 
decision of the bulls leading the van, who, with trunks 
flung up and crooked forward, were holding the scent 
as a man holds a line. They had only a moment of time, 
but he who knows the elephant folk knows well the rapidity 
with which their minds can reason, and from their action 
it would seem that the arbiters of Berselius’s fate reasoned 
thus: “The enemy were behind; they are now in front. 
So be it. Let us charge.” 

And they charged, with a blast of trumpeting that 
shook the sky; with trunks flung up and forward-driving 
tusks, ears spread like great sails, and a sound like the 
thunder of artillery, they charged the scent, the body of 
the herd following the leaders, as the body of a batter- 
ing ram follows the head. 

Adams, when he had flung himself down in his tent, 
fell asleep instantly. This sleep, which was profound 
and dreamless*, lasted but half an hour, and was succeeded 
by a slumber in which, as in a darkened room where a 
magic-lantern is being operated, vivid and fantastic pic- 



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THE GREAT HERD 


147 


tures arose before him. He was on the march with the 
column through a country infinite as is space; the road 
they were taking, like the road to the tombs of the Chinese 
kings, was lined on either side with animals done in stone. 
At first these were tigers, and then, as though some 
veil of illusion had been withdrawn, he discovered them 
to be creatures far larger and more cruel, remorseless, 
and fearful than tigers; they were elephants — great 
stone elephants that had been standing there under the 
sun from everlasting, and they dwindled in perspec- 
tive from giants to pigmies and from pigmies to grains of 
sand, for they were the guardians of a road whose end 
was infinity. 

Then these vanished, but the elephant country under 
the burning sun remained. There was nothing to be 
seen but the sun- washed spaces of wind-blown grass, 
and broken ground, and scattered trees, till across the 
sky in long procession, one following the other, passed 
shadow elephants. Shadows each thrice the height of the 
highest mountain, and these things called forth in the 
mind of the sleeper such a horror and depth of dread that 
he started awake with the sweat running down his face. 

Sleep was shattered, and in ihe excitement and nerve- 
tension of over-tiredness he lay tossing on his back. The 
long march of the day before, in which men had matched 
themselves against moving mountains, the obsession of 
the things they had been pursuing, had combined to 
shatter sleep. 

He came out in the open for a breath of air. 

The camp was plunged in sluniber. The two sentries 






































































































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148 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


ordered by Berselius to keep watch and to feed the fire 
lay like the others, with arms outspread; the fire was burn- 
ing low, as though drowned out by the flood of moon- 
light, and Adams was on the point of going to the pile of 
fuel for some sticks to feed it, when he saw a sight which 
was one of the strangest, perhaps, that he would ever see. 

The sentry lying on the right of the fire sat up, rose to 
his feet, went to the wood pile, took an armful of fuel 
and flung it on the embers. 

The fire roared up and crackled, and the sleep-walker, 
who had performed this act with wide-staring eyes that 
saw nothing, returned to his place and lay down. 

It was as if the order of Berselius still rang in his ears 
and the vision of Berselius still dominated his mind. 

Adams, thinking of this strange thing, stood with 
the wind fanning his face, looking over the country to 
the west, the country they had traversed that day in tribu- 
lation under the burning sun. There was nothing to 
tell now of the^wearv march, the pursuit of phantoms, 
the long, long miles of labour; all was peaceful and coldly 
beautiful, moonlit and silent. 

He was about to return to his tent when a faint sound 
struck his ear. A faint, booming sound, just like that 
which troubles us when the eardrum vibrates on its own 
account from exhaustion or the effect of drugs. 

He stopped his ears and the sound ceased. 

Then he knew that the sound was a real sound borne 
on the air. 

He thought it was coming to him on the wind, which 
was now blowing steadily in his face, and he strained 











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THE GREAT HERD 


149 


his eyes to see the cause; but he saw nothing. There 
was no cloud in the sky or storm on the horizon, yet the 
sound was increasing. Boom, boom, becoming deeper 
and more sonorous, now like the long roll of muffled drums, 
now like the sea bursting in the sea-caves of a distant 
coast, or the drums of the cyclone when they beat the 
charge for the rushing winds. But the heart-searching 
feature of this strange booming in the night was a rhythm, 
a pulsation that spoke of life. This was no dull shift- 
ing of matter, as in an earthquake, or of air as in a storm; 
this sound was alive. 

Adams sprang to the tent where Berselius was sleeping, 
and dragged him out by the arm, crying, “Listen!” 

He would have cried, “See!” but the words withered 
on his lips at the sight which was now before him as he 
faced east. 

An acre of rollicking and tossing blackness storming 
straight for the camp across the plain under the thun- 
der that was filling the night. A thing inconceivable 
and paralyzing, till the iron grip of Berselius seized his 
arm, driving him against the tree, and the voice of Ber- 
selius cried, “Elephants.” 

In a moment Adams was in the lower branches of the 
great tree, and scarcely had he gained his position 
than the sky split with the trumpeting of the charge and, 
as a man dying sees his whole life with one glance, he saw 
the whole camp of awakened sleepers fly like wind-blown 
leaves from before the oncoming storm, leaving only two 
figures remaining, the figures af Berselius and Felix. 

The Zappo Zap had gone apart from the camp to 




150 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


sleep. He had drugged himself by smoking hemp, and 
he was lying half a hundred yards away, face down on 
the ground, dead to everything in earth and heaven. 

Berselius had spied him. 

What Adams saw then was, perhaps, the most heroic 
act ever recorded of man. The soul-shattering terror of 
the advancing storm, the thunder and the trumpeting that 
never ceased, had no effect on the iron heart of Berselius, 

He made the instantaneous calculation that it was 
just possible to kick the man awake (for sound has no 
effect on the hemp-drugged one) and get him to the tree 
and a chance of safety. And he made the attempt. 

And he would have succeeded but that he fell. 

The root of a dead tree, whose trunk had long vanished * 
Caught his foot when he had made half the distance, 
and brought him down flat on his face. 

It was as though God had said, “Not jso.” 

Adams, in an agony, sweat pouring from him, watched 
Berselius rise to his feet. He rose slowly as if with 
deliberation, and then he stood fronting the oncoming 
storm. Whether he was dazed, or whether he knew that 
he had miscalculated his chances, who knows ? But there 
he stood, as if disdaining to fly, face fronting the enemy. 
And it seemed to the watcher that the figure of that man 
was the figure of a god, till the storm closed on him, and 
Seized and swung aloft by a trunk, he was flung away like 
a stone from a catapult somewhere into the night. 

Just as a man clings to a mast in a hurricane, deaf, 
blind, all his life and energy in his arms, Adams clung 
to the tree bole above the branch upon which he was. 






































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THE BROKEN CAMP 


151 


The storm below, the smashing of great bodies against 
the tree, the trumpeting whose prolonged scream never 
ceased — all were nothing. His mind was cast out — 
he had flung it away just as the elephant had flung Ber- 
selius away. To him the universe was the tree to which 
he was clinging, just that part which his arms encircled. 

The herd had attacked in three columns, keeping the 
very same formation as they had kept from the start. 
The northern column, consisting of cows with their calves* 
drove on as if to safety, the others, cows and bulls — 
the cows even more ferocious than the bulls — attacked 
the camps, the tents, and the fire. They stamped and 
trod the fire out* smashing tent poles and chop boxes* 
stores and cooking utensils, tusking one another in the 
tight-packed melee , and the scream of the trumpeting 
never ceased. 

1 Then they drove on. 

The porters, all except two, had, unhappily for them- 
selves, fled in a body to the west, and now mixed with 
the trumpeting and thunder could be heard the screams 
of men trodden under foot or tusked to pieces. These 
sounds ceased, and the trumpeting died away, and noth- 
ing could be distinguished but the dull boom, boom of 
the herd sweeping away west, growing faintef and fainter, 
and dying away in the night. 



_ /:' ' 

CHAPTER XX 

THE BROKEN CAMP 

T HE whole thing had scarcely lasted twenty minutes. 
During the storming and trumpeting, Adams, 
clinging to the tree, had felt neither terror nor 
interest. His mind was cast out, all hut a vestige of it; 
this remnant of mind recognized that it was lying in the 
open palm of Death, and it was not afraid. Not only 
that, but it felt lazily triumphant. It is only the reason- 
ing mind that fears death, the mind that can still say to 
itself, “What will come after?” The intuitive mind, 
which does not reason, has no fear. 

Had not the herd been so closely packed and so furious, 
Adams would have been smelt out, plucked from the tree 
and stamped to pieces without any manner of doubt. 
But the elephants, jammed together, tusking each other, 
and rooting the camp to pieces, had passed on, not know- 
ing that they had left a living man behind them. 

As the sound of the storm died away, he came to his 
senses as a man comes to his senses after the inhalation 
of ether, and the first thing that was borne in upon him 
was the fact that he was blinging to a tree, and that he 
could not let go. His arms encircled the rough bark 
like bands of iron; they had divorced themselves from his 

1 52 




THE BROKEN CAMP 


153 


will power, they held him there despite himself, not from 
muscular rigidity or spasm, but just because they refused 
to let go. They were doing the business of clinging to 
safety on their own account, and he had to think himself 
free. There was no use in ordering them to release him, 
he had to reason with them. Then, little by little, they 
(fingers first) returned to discipline, and he slipped down 
and came to earth, literally, for his knees gave under him 
and he fell. 

He was a very brave man and a very strong man, 
but now, just released from Death, now that all danger 
was over, he was very much afraid. He had seen and 
heard Life: Life whipped to fury, screaming and in 
maelstrom action. Life in its loudest and most appalling 
phase, and he felt as a man might feel to whom the gods 
had shown a near view of that tempest of fire we call 
the sun. 

He sat up and looked around him on the pitiable ruins 
of the camp on which a tornado could not have wrought 
more destruction. Something lay glittering in the moon- 
light close to him. He picked it up. It was his shaving- 
glass, the most fragile thing in all their belongings, yet 
unbroken. Tent-poles had been smashed to match- 
wood, cooking utensils trodden flat, guns broken to pieces; 
yet this thing, useless and fragile, had been carefully 
preserved, watched over by some god of its own. 

He was dropping it from his fingers when a cry from 
behind him made him turn his head. 

A dark figure was approaching in the moonlight. 

It was the Zappo Zap. The man whom BerseliUs, 










154 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


with splendid heroism, had tried to save. Like the 
looking-glass, and protected, perhaps, by some god of 
his own, the columns of destruction had passed him by. 
The column of cows with their calves had passed him 
on the other side. Old hunters have told me that 
elephants will not trouble with a dead man, and Felix, 
though awakened by the shaking of the earth, had lain 
like a dead man as the storm swept by. 

He was very much alive, now, and seemingly uncon- 
cerned as he came toward Adams, stood beside him, 
and looked around. 

“All gone dam/’ said Felix. And volumes would 
not have expressed the situation more graphically. Then 
the savage, having contemplated the scene for a moment, 
rushed forward to a heap of stuff — broken boxes and 
what not — dragged something from it and gave a shout. 

It was the big elephant rifle, with its cartridge-bag 
attached. The stock was split, but the thing was prac- 
tically intact. Felix waved it over his l eal and laughed 
and whooped. 

“Gun!” yelled Felix. 

Adams beckoned to him, and he came like a black devil 
in the moonlight — a black devil with filed teeth and 
flashing eyeballs — and Adams pointed to the tree and 
motioned him to leave the gun there and follow him. 
Felix obeyed, and Adams started in the direction in which 
he had seen Berselius flung. 

It was not far to walk, and they had not far to search 
A hundred yards took them to a break in the ground, 
<and there in the moonlight, with arms extended, lay the 



THE BROKEN CAMP 


155 


body of the once powerful Berselius, the man who had 
driven them like sheep, the man whose will was law. 
The man of wealth and genius, great as Lucifer in evil, yet 
in courage and heroism tremendous. God-man or devil- 
man, or a combination of both, but great, incontestably 
great and compelling. 

Adams knelt down beside the body, and the Zappo 
Zap stood by with incurious eyes looking on. 

Berselius was not dead. He was breathing; breath- 
ing deeply and stertorously, as men breathe in apoplexy 
or after sunstroke or ruinous injury to the brain. Adams 
tore open the collar of the hunting shirt; then he exam- 
ined the limbs. 

Berselius, flung like a stone from a catapult, had, 
Unfortunately for himself, not broken a limb. That 
might have saved him. His head was the injured part, 
and Adams, running his fingers through the hair, matted 
with blood, came on the mischief. The right parietal 
bone was dented very slightly for a space nearly as broad 
as a penny. The skin was broken, but the bone itself, 
though depressed slightly, was not destroyed. The inner 
table of the skull no doubt was splintered, hence the 
brain mischief. 

There was only one thing to be done — trephine. 
And that as swiftly as possible. 

Everything needful was in the instrument-case, but 
had it escaped destruction ? 

He raised Berselius by the shoulders. Felix took 
the feet, and between them they Carried the body to the 
tree, where they laid it down. 



156 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


Before starting to hunt for the instruments, Adams 
bled Berselius with his penknife. The effect was almost 
instaneous. The breathing became less stertorous and 
laboured. Then he started to search hither and thither 
for the precious mahogany case which held the amputat- 
ing knives, the tourniquets and the trephine. The Zappo 
Zap was no use, as he did not know anything about the 
stores, and had never even seen the instrument case, 
so Adams had to conduct the search alone, in a hurry, 
and over half an acre of ground. The case had almost 
to a certainty been smashed to pieces; still, there was a 
chance that the trephine had escaped injury. He remem- 
bered the shaving-glass, and how it had been miraculously 
preserved, and started to work. He came across a flat 
oblong disc of tin; it had been a box of sardines, it was 
now flattened out as though by a rollihg mill. He came 
across a bottle of brandy sticking jauntily up from a hole 
in the ground, as if saying, “ Have a drink.” It was 
intact. He knocked the head off and, accepting the 
dumb invitation, put it back where he had found it, 
and went on. 

He came across long strips of the green rot-proof 
stuff the tents had been made of. They looked as though 
they had been torn up like this for ribroller bandages, 
for they were just of that width. He came across half a 
mosquito-net, the other half was sailing awav north, 
streaming from the tusk of a bull in which it was tangled, 
and giving him, no doubt, a sufficiently bizarre appear- 
ance under the quiet light of the moon and stars. 

There were several chop boxes of stores intact; and 




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THE BROKEN CAMP 


157 


a cigar box without a crack in it, and also without a cigar. 
It looked as though it had been carefully opened, emptied, 
and laid down. There was no end to the surprises of this 
search: things brayed to pieces as if with a pestle and 
mortar, things easily smashable untouched. 

He had been searching for two hours when he found 
the trephine. It lay near the brass lock of the amputating 
case, attached to which there were some pieces of mahog- 
any from the case itself. 

A trephine is just like a corkscrew, only in place of 
the screw you have a cup of steel. This steel cup has a 
serrated edge: it is. in fact, a small circular saw. Apply- 
ing the saw edge to the bone, and working the handle 
with half turns of the wrist, you can remove a disc from 
the outer table of the skull just as a cook stamps cakes 
•out of a sheet of dough with a “ cutter.” 

Adams looked at the thing in his hands; the cup of 
chilled steel, thin as paper and brittle as glass, had been 
smashed to pieces, presumably; at all events, it was not 
there. 

He flung the handle and the shaft away and came back 
to the tree beneath which the body of Berselius was 
lying. Berselius, still senseless, was breathing deeply 
and slowly, and Adams, having cut away the hair of the 
scalp round the wound with his penknife, went to the 
pool for water to bathe the wound; but the pool was 
trodden up into slush, and hours must elapse before the 
mud would settle. He remembered the bottle of brandy, 
fetched it, washed the wound with brandy, and with 
his handkerchief torn into three pieces bound it up. 





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158 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


There was nothing more to be done; and he sat down 
with his back to the tree to wait for dawn. 

The bitterness of the thing was in his heart, the bit- 
terness of being there with hands willing and able to help,, 
yet helpless. A surgeon is as useless without his instru- 
ments as the cold lifeless instruments are without a hand 
tb *guide them. It is not his fault that his hands are tied,, 
but if he is a man of any feeling; that does not lessen the* 
anguish of the situation. 

Adams, listening to the breathing of the man he could 
not save, sat watching the moonlit desert where the grass 
waved in the wind. Felix, lying on his belly, had resumed 
his slumbers, and beside the sleeping savage lay the thing 
he worshipped more than his god, the big elephant rifle, 
adross the stock of which his naked arfn was flung. 





CHAPTER XXI 


£■ 


THE FEAST OF THE VULTURES „ 

A DAMS, who had fallen asleep, was awakened by a 
whoop from Felix. 

It was full, blazing day, and the Zappo Zap, 
standing erect just as he had sprung from sleep, was star- 
ing with wrinkled eyes straight out across the land. Two 
black figures were approaching. They were the two por- 
ters who had fled westward, and who, with Felix, were 
all that remained of Berselius’s savage train of followers. 

The rest were over there 

Over there to the west, where vultures and marabouts 
and kites were holding a clamorous meeting; over there, 
where the ground was black with birds. 

The two wretches approaching the camping place 
rolled their eyes in terror, glancing over there. They 
had run for miles and hidden themselves in a donga. 
They had heard the tragedy from afar, the storming and 
trumpeting, and the shrieks of men being destroyed, 
torn to pieces, trampled to pulp; they had heard the thun- 
der of the vanishing herd, and they had listened to the 
awful silence that followed, lying on their faces, clinging 
to the breast of their old, cold, cruel Mother Earth. With 
day, like homing pigeons, they had returned to the campv 

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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


“Hi yi!” yelled Felix, and a response came like the 
cry of a seagull. They were shivering as dogs shiver 
when ill or frightened; their teeth were chattering, and 
they had a curious gray, dusky look; the very oil of their 
skins seemed to have dried up, and old chain scars on 
their necks and ankles showed white and leprous looking 
in the bright morning sunshine. 

But Adams had no time to attend to them. Having 
glanced in their direction, he turned to Berselius, bent 
over him, and started back in surprise. 

Berselius’s eyes were open; he was breathing regularly 
and slowly, and he looked like a man who, just awakened 
from sleep, was yet too lazy to move. 

Adams touched him upon the shoulder, and Berselius, 
raising his right hand, drew it over his face as if to chase 
away sleep. Then his head dropped, and he lay looking 
up at the sky. Then he yawned twice, deeply, and turn- 
ing his head on his left shoulder looked about him lazily, 
his eyes resting here and there: on the two porters who 
were sitting, with knees drawn up, eating some food which 
Felix had given them; on the broken camp furniture 
and the heaps of raffle left by the catastrophe of the 
night before; on the skyline where the grass waved against 
the morning blue. 

Adams heaved a sigh of relief. The man had only 
been stunned. None of the vital centres of the brain 
had been injured. Some injury there must be, but the 
main springs of life were intact. There was no paralysis, 
for now the sick man was raising his left hand, and, 
moving about as a person moves in bed to get a more 























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FEAST OF THE VULTURES 


HU 


comfortable position, he raised both knees and then, 
turning over on his right side, straightened them out again. 
Now, by the movements of a sick person you can tell 
pretty nearly the condition of his brain. 

All the movements of this sick man were normal ; 
they indicated great tiredness, nothing more. The shock 
and the loss of blood might account for that. Adams 
the night before had made a pillow from his own coat for 
the stricken one’s head; he was bending now to rearrange 
it, but he desisted. Berselius was asleep. 

Adams remained on his knees for a moment contem- 
plating his patient with deep satisfaction. Then he rose 
to his feet. Some shelter must be improvised to protect 
the sleeping man from the sun, but in the raffle around 
there did not seem enough tent cloth to make even an 
umbrella. 

Calling Felix and the two porters to follow him, he 
started off, searching amidst the debris here and there, 
setting the porters to work to collect the remains of the 
stores and to bring them back to the tree, hunting in vain 
for what he wanted, till Felix, just as they reached the 
northern limit of destruction, pointed west to where the 
birds were still busy, clamorous and gorging. 

“What is it?” asked Adams. 

“Tent,” replied Felix. 

To the left of where the birds were, and close to them, 
lay a mound of something showing dark amidst the grass. 
It was a tent, or a large part of one of the tents; tangled, 
perhaps, in a tusk, it had been brought here and cast, just 
,&s a storm might have brought and cast it. Even at 




























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M THE POOLS OF SILENCE 

this distance the air was tainted with the odour of the 
birds and their prey, but the thing had to be fetched, 
and Adams was not the man to exhibit qualms before 
a savage. 

“Come,” said he, and they started. 

The birds saw them coming, and some flew away; 
others, trying to fly away, rose in the air heavily and 
fluttering a hundred yards sank and scattered about in 
the grass, looking like great vermin; a few remained 
waddling here and there, either too impudent for flight 
or too greatly gorged. 

Truly it had been a great killing, and the ground was 
ripped as if by ploughs. Over a hundred square yards 
lay blistering beneath the sun, red and blue and black; 
and the torment of it pierced the silence like a shout, 
though not a movement was there, save the movement of 
the bald-headed vulture as he waddled, or the flapping of 
a rag of skin to the breeze 

They seized on the tent, the Zappo Zap laughing and 
with teeth glinting in the sun. It was the smallest tent, 
ripped here and there, but otherwise sound ; the mosquito 
net inside was intact and rolled up like a ball, but the 
pole was broken in two. 

As they carried it between them*, they had to pass near 
a man. He was very dead that man; a great foot had 
trodden on his face, and it was flattened out, looking like 
a great black flat-fish in which a child, for fun, had 
punched holes for eyes and mouth and nose; it was cur- 
ling up at the edges under the Sun’s fays, becoming 
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FEAST OF THE VULTURES 


163 


“ B’selius,” said Felix, with a laugh, indicating this 
thing as they passed it. 

Adams had his hands full, or he would have struck 
the brute to the ground. He contented himself with 
driving the tent pole into the small of his back to ur^e 
him forward. From that moment he conceived a hatred 
for Felix such as few men have felt, for it was not a hatred 
against a ipan, or even a brute, but a black automatic 
figure with filed teeth, a thing with the brain and heart 
t of an alligator, yet fashioned after God’s own image. 

,A hatred for Felix* and a pity for Berselius. 












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CHAPTER XXII 


THE LOST GUIDE 

T HEY improvised a shelter against the tree with the 
tent cloth over the sleeping man, and then Adams 
set Felix to work splicing and mending the tent 
pole. The two porters, who had stuffed themselves with 
food, were looking better and a shade more human; 
the glossy look was coming back to their skins and the 
fright was leaving their faces. He set them to work, 
piling the recovered stores in the bit of shade cast by the 
tree and the improvised tent, and as they did so he took 
toll of the stuff. 

He judged that there was enough provisions to take 
them back along the road they had come by. The hunt 
was ended. Even should Berselius recover fully in a 
Couple of days, Adams determined to insist on a return. 
But he did not expect any resistance. 

It was a long, long, wearisome day. The great far- 
stretching land, voiceless except just over there where 
birds were still busy and would be busy till all was gone; 
the cloudless sky, and the shifting shadow of the 
tree; these were the best company he had; the blacks 
were not companions. The two porters seemed leas 
human than dogs, and Felix poisoned his sight. 

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THE LOST GUIDE 


165 


His dislike for this man had been steadily growing, 
The thought that Berselius had risked his life for this 
creature, and the remembrance of how he had pointed to 
the dead man with a grin and said “ B’selius,” had brought 
matters to a head in the mind of Adams, and turned his 
dislike into a furious antipathy. He sat now in what 
little shadow there was, watching the figure of the 
Zappo Zap. 

Felix, the tent-pole finished, had slunk off westward, 
hunting about, or pretending to hunt for salvage. Little 
by little the black figure dwindled till it reached where 
the birds were discoursing and clamouring, and Adams 
felt his blood grow cold as he watched the birds rise like 
a puff of black smoke and scatter, some this way, some 
that; some flying right away, some settling down near by. 

The black figure, a tiny sketch against the sky, wan- 
dered hither and thither, and then vanished. 

Felix had sat him down. 

Adams rose up and took the elephant rifle, took from 
the bag a great solid drawn brass cartridge, loaded the 
Jrifle, and sat down again in the shade. 

Berselius was sleeping peacefully. He could hear the 
teven respirations through the tent cloth. The porters 
were sleeping in the sun as only niggers can sleep when 
they are tired; but Adams was feeling &s if he could never 
sleep again, as he sat waiting and watching and listening 
to the faint whisper, whisper of the grass as the wind bent 
[ it gently in its passage. 

A long time passed, and then the black sketch appeared 
•again outlined on the sky. It. grew ‘in size, «and as it grew 




























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166 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


Adams fingered the triggers of the gun, and his lips became 
as dry as sand, so that he had to lick them and keep on 
licking them, till his tongue became dry as his lips and his 
palate dry as his tongue. 

Then he rose up, rifle in hand, for the Zappo Zap had 
come to speaking distance. Adams advanced to meet 
him. There was a dry, dull glaze about the creatures 
lips and chin that told a horrible story, and at the sight 
of it the white man halted dead, pointed away to 
where the birds were again congregating, cried “Gr-r-r,” 
as a man cries to a dog that has misbehaved, and flung 
the rifle to his shoulder. 

Felix broke away and ran. Ran, striking eastward, 
and bounding as a buck antelope bounds with a leopard 
at its heels, whilst the ear-shattering report of the great 
rifle rang across the land and a puff of white dust broke 
from the ground near the black bounding figure. Adams, 
cursing himself for having missed, grounded the gun 
butt and stood watching the dot in the distance till it 
vanished from sight. 

He had forgotten the fact that Felix was the guide 
and that without him the return would be a hazardous 
one; but had he remembered this, it would have made 
no difference. Better to die in the desert twenty times 
over than to return escorted by that. 

It was now getting toward sundown. The great 
elephant country in which the camp lay lost had, dur- 
ing the daytime, three phases. Three spirits presided 
over this place; the spirit of morning., of nooiy, and «af 
evening. 



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THE LOST GUIDE 


167 


In towns and cities, even in the open country of civilized 
lands, these three are clad in language and bohnd in 
chains of convention, reduced to slaves whose task is to 
call men to rise, to eat, or sleep. But here, in this vast 
place, one saw them naked — naked and free as when 
they caught the world’s first day, like a new minted 
coin struck from darkness and spun it behind them 
into night. 

Under the presidency of these three spirits the land 
was ever changing; the country of the morning was not 
the country of the noon, nor was the country of the 
noon the country of the evening. 

The morning was loud. I can express it in no other 
terms. Dawn came like a blast of trumpets, driving 
the flocks of the red flamingoes before it, tremendous, and 
shattering the night of stars at the first fanfare. A 
moment later, and, changing the image, imagination 
could hear the sea of light bursting against the far edge of 
the horizon, even as you watched the spindrift of it surg- 
ing up to heaven and the waves of it breaking over ridge 
and tree and plain of waving grass. 

Noon was the hour of silence. Under the pyramid 
of light the land lay speechless, without a shadow except 
the shadow of the flying bird, or a sound except the sigh 
of the grass, touched and bent by the wind, if it blew. 

Evening brought with it a new country. There was 
no dusk here, no beauties of twilight, but the level light 
of sunset brought a beauty of its own. Distance stood 
over the land, casting trees farther away, and spread- 
ing the prairies of grass with her magic. 



























































































































































































































































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168 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


The country, now, had a new population. The 
shadows. Nowhere else, perhaps, do shadows grow and 
live as here, where the atmosphere and the level light of 
evening combine to form the quaintest shadows on earth. 
The giraffe has for his counterpart a set of shadow legs 
ten yards long, and the elephant in his shadow state goes 
on stilts. A man is followed by a pair of black com- 
passes, and a squat tent flings to the east the shadow of 
a sword. 

Adams was sitting looking at the two porters whom 
he had set to hunt for firewood; he was watching their 
grotesque figures, and more than grotesque shadows* 
when a movement of the sick man under the tent cloth 
caused him to turn. 

Berselius had awakened. More than that, he was 
sitting up, and before Adams could put up a hand, the 
tent cloth was flung back, and the head and shoulders 
of the sick man appeared. 

His face was pale, his hair in disorder; but his con- 
sciousness had fully returned. He recognized Adams 
with a glance, and then, without speaking, struggled 
ito free himself of the tent-cloth and get on his feet. 

Adams helped him. 

Berselius-, leaning on the arm of his companion, looked 
around him, and then stood looking at the setting sun. 

The glorious day was very near its end. The sun 
huge and half-shorn of his beams, was sinking slowly., 
inevitably; scarce two diameters divided his lower edge 
from the horizon that was thirsting for him as the grave 
fthirsts for man. Thus fades, shorn of its dazzle, and 


I 


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THE LOST GUIDE 


169 


splendour, the intellect so triumphant at noon, the per- 
sonality, the compelling will; the man himself when night 
has touched him. 

“Are you better?” asked Adams. 

Berselius made no reply. 

Like a child, held by some glittering bauble, he seemed 
fascinated by the sun. The western sky was marked 
by a thin reef of cloud, dull gold, it momentarily brightened 
to burnished gold, and then to fire. 

The sun touched the horizon. Ere one could say 
“Look!” he was half gone. The blazing arc of his upper 
limb hung for a moment palpitating, then it dwindled 
to a point, vanished, and a wave of twilight, like the 
shadow of a wing, passed over the land. 

As Berselius, leaning on the arm of his companion, 
turned, it was already night. 

The camp fire which the porters had lit was crackling, 
and Berselius, helped by his friend, sat down with his 
back to the tree and his face toward the fire. 

“Are you better?” asked Adams, as he took a seat 
beside him and proceeded to light a pipe. 

“My head,” said Berselius. As he spoke he put 
his hand to his head as a person puts his hand to his 
forehead when he is dazed. 

“Have you any pain?” 

“No, no pain, but there is a mist.” 

“ You can see all right ?” 

“Yes, yes, I can see. It is not my sight,, but there is 
a mist — in my head.” 

Adams guessed what he meant. The man’s mind had 




































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170 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


been literally shaken up. He knew, too, that thought 
and mental excitement were the worst things for him. 

Don’t think about it,” said he. “It will pass. You 
have had a knock on the head. Just lean back against 
the tree, for I want to dress the wound. 5 ’ 

He undid the bandage, fetched some water from the 
pool, which was now clear, and set to work. The wound 
was healthy and seemed much less severe than it had 
seemed the night before. The dent in the bone seemed 
quite inconsiderable. The inner table of the skull might, 
after all, be not injured. One thing was certain: whatever 
mischief the cortex of the brain had suffered, the prime 
centres had escaped. Speech and movement were per- 
fect and thought was rational. 

“There,” said Adams, when he had finished his dress- 
ings and taken his seat, ‘‘you are all right now. But 
don’t talk or do any thinking. The mist, as you call it, 
in your head will pass away.” 

“I can see,” said Berselius; then he stopped, hesitated, 
and went on — “I can see last night — I can see us all 
here by the camp fire, but beyond that I cannot see, for 
a great white mist hides everything. And still” — he 
burst out — “I seem to know everything hidden by that 
mist, but I can’t see, I can’t see. What is this thing that 
has happened to me?” 

“You know your name ?” 

“Yes, my name is Berselius, just as your name is Adams. 
My mind is clear, my memory is clear, but I have lost the 
sight of memory. Beyond the camp fire of last night, 
everything is a thick mist — I am afraid!” 
















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THE LOST GUIDE 


171 


He took Adams’s big hand, and the big man gulped 
suddenly at the words and the action. 

The great Berselius afraid! The man who had faced 
the elephants, the man who cared not a halfpenny for 
death, the man who was so far above the stature of other 
men, sitting there beside him and holding his hand like 
a little child, and saying, “I am afraid!” 

And the voice of Berselius was not the voice of the 
Berselius of yesterday. It had lost the decision and com- 
manding tone that made it so different from the voices of 
common men. 

“It will pass,” said Adams. “It is only a shake up 
of the brain. Why, I have seen a man after a blow on 
the head with his memory clean wiped out. He had to 
learn his alphabet again.” 

Berselius did not reply. His head was nodding for- 
ward in sleep. He had slept all day, but sleep had taken 
him again suddenly, just as it takes a child, and Adams 
placed him under the improvised tent with the coat for 
a pillow under his head, and then sat by the fire. 

Memory, of all things in this wonderful world is surely 
the most wonderful. It is there now, and the next 
moment it is not. You leave your house in London, and 
you are next found in Brighton, sane to all intents and 
(purposes,, but your memory is gone. A dense fog hides 
everything you have ever done, dreamed or spoken.. 
You may have committed crimes in your past life, or yo*a 
may have been a saint. It is all the same, for the moment. 
Until the mfet breaks up and your past reappears. 

Berselius’s case was a phase of this condition. He 



172 THE POOLS OF SILENCE 

knew his name — everything lay before his mind up to 
a certai i point. Beyond that he knew all sorts of things 
were lying, but he could not see them. To use his own 
eloquent expression, he had lost the sight of memory. 

If you recall your past, It comes in pictures. You 
have to ransack a great photographic gallery. Before 
you can think, you must see. 

Beyond a certain point Berselius had lost the sight 
of memory. In other words, he had lost his past. 




CHAPTER XXIII 


BEYOND THE SKYLINE 

A DAMS, wearied to death with the events of the 
past day and night, slept by the camp fire the 
deep dreamless sleep of utter exhaustion. He 
had piled the fire with wood, using broken boxes, slow- 
burning vangueria brushwood, and the remains of a 
ruined mimosa tree that lay a hundred yards from the 
camp, and he lay by it now as soundly asleep as the two 
porters and Berselius. The fire stood guard; crackling 
and flickering beneath the stars, it showed a burning spark 
that made the camping place determinable many miles 
away. 

Now the Zappo Zap, when he had fled from Adams, 
put ten miles of country behind him, going almost with 
the swiftness of an antelope, taking low bush and broken 
ground in his stride, and halting only when i ns t in cf brought 
him to a stand, saying, “ You are safe.” 

He knew the country well, and the thirty miles that 
separated him from the eastern forest, where he could 
obtain food and shelter, were nothing to him. He could 
have run nearly the whole" distance and reached there in 
a few hours’ time. 

But time was also nothing to him. He had fed, well, 
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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


and could last two days without food. It was not his 
intention to desert the camp yet; for at the camp, under 
that tree away to the west, lay a thing that he lusted 
after as men lust for drink or love: the desire of his dark 
mn\ — the elephant gun. 

Before Adams drove him away from the camp he had 
made up his mind to steal it. Sneak off with it in the 
night and vanish with it into his own country away to the 
northeast, leaving B’selius and his broken camp to fend 
for themselves. This determination was still unshaken; 
the thing held him like a charm, and he sat down, squat- 
ting in the grass with his knees drawn up to his chin and 
his eyes fixed westward, waiting for evening. 

An hour before sunset he made for the camp, reach- 
ing within a mile of it as the light left the sky. He watched 
the camp fire burning, and made for it. Toward mid' 
night, crawling on his belly, soundless as a snake, he 
crept right up beside Adams, seized the gun and the 
cartridge bag, and with them in his hands stood erect. 

He had no fear now. He knew he could outrun any- 
one there. He held the gun by the barrels. Adams’s 
white face, as he lay with mouth open, snoring and 
deep in slumber, presented an irresistible mark for the 
heavy gun butt, and all would have been over with that 
sleeper in this world, had not the attention of the savage 
been drawn to an object that suddenly appeared from 
beneath the folds of the improvised tent. 

It was the hand of Berselius. 

Berselius, moving uneasily in his sleep, had flung out 
his arm; the clenched fist, like the emblem of power, 


















BEYOND THE SKYLINE 


17 £ 

struck the eye of the Zappo Zap, and quelled him as th« 
sight of the whip quells a dog. 

B’selius was alive and able to clench his fist. That fact 
was enough for Felix, and next moment he was gone, 
and the moonlight cast his black shadow as he ran. making 
northeast, a darkness let loose on life and on the land. 

Adams awoke at sun-up to find the gun and the cart- 
ridge bag gone. The porters knew nothing. He had 
picked up enough of their language to interrogate them, 
but they could only shake their heads, and he was debat- 
ing in his own mind whether he ought to kick them on 
principle, when Berselius made his appearance from the 
tent. 

His strength had come back to him. The dazed look 
of the day before had left his face, but the expression 
of the face was altered. The half smile which had been 
such a peculiar feature of his countenance was no longer 
there. The level eye that raised to no man and lowered 
before no man, the aspect of command and the ease of 
perfect control and power — where were they? 

Adams, as he looked at his companion, felt a pang such 
as we feel when we see a human being suddenly and 
terribly mutilated. 

Who has not known a friend who, from an accident 
in the hunting field, the shock of a railway collision, or 
some great grief, has suddenly changed; of whom people 
say, “Ah, yes, since the accident he has never been the 
same man ?” 

A friend who yesterday was hale and hearty* full of 
Will power and brain, and who to-day is a different person 
























































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176 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


with drooping under-lip, lack-lustre eye, and bearing 
in every movement the indecision which marks the 
inferior mind. 

Berselius’s under-lip did not droop, nor did his manner 
lack the ordinary decision of a healthy man; the change 
in him was slight, but it was startlingly evident. So 
high had Nature placed him above other men, that a 
crack in the pedestal was noticeable; as to the injury 
to the statue itself, the ladder of time would be required 
before that could be fully discovered. 

So far from being: downcast this morning, Berselius 
was mildly cheerful. He washed and had his wound 
dressed, and then sat down to a miserable breakfast of 
cold tinned meat and cassava cakes, with water fetched 
from the pool in a cracked calabash. 

He said nothing about the mist in his head, and Adams 
carefully avoided touching on the question. 

“Sleep has put him all right,” said Adams to himself. 
“All the same, he ’s not the man he was. He ’s a dozen 
times more human and like other men. Wonder how 
long it will last. Just as long as he ’s feeling sick, I 
expect.” 

He rose to fetch his pipe when Berselius, who had 
finished eating and had also risen to his feet, beckoned 
him to come close. 

“That is the road we came by?” said Berselius, point- 
ing over the country toward the west. 

“Yes,” said Adams, “that is the road/’ 

“Do you see the skyline?” said Berselius- 

^Yes, I see the skyline.” 



















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BEYOND THE SKYLINE 


177 


“Well, my memory carries me to the skyline, but not 
beyond.” 

“Oh, Lord!” said Adams to himself, “here he is begin- 
ning it all over again!” 

“I can remember,” said Berselius, “everything that 
happened as far as my eye carries me. For instance, 
by that tree a mile away a porter fell down. He was 
very exhausted. And when we had passed that ridge 
near the skyline we saw two birds fighting; two bald- 
headed vultures — - — ” 

“That is so,” said Adams. 

“But beyond the skyline,” said Berselius, suddenly 
becoming excited and clutching his companion’s arm, 
“I see nothing. I know nothing. All is mist — all 
is mist.” 

“Yes, yes,” said the surgeon. “It ’s only memory 
blindness. It will come back.” 

“Ah, but will it? If I can get to the skyline and see 
the country beyond, and if I remember that, and if I go 
on and on, the way we came, and if I remember as I go, 
then, then> I will be saved. But if I get to that skyline 
and if I find that the mist stops me from seeing beyond, 
then I pray you kill me, for the agony of this thing is not 
to be borne.” Suddenly he ceased, and then, as if to some 
unseen person, he cried out — 

“I have left my memory on that road.” 

Adams, frightened at the man’s agitation; tried ^t<| 
soothe him, but Berselius, in the grip of this awful desire 
to pierce back beyond that mist and find himself, would 
hot be soothed. Nothing would satisfy him but to strike 


\ 




l 178 THE POOLS OF SILENCE 

camp knd return along the road they had come by. Some 
instinct told him that the sight of the things he had ee?n 
would wake up memory, and that bit by bit, as he went, 
the mist would retreat before him, and perhaps vanish 
at last. Some instinct told him this, but reason, who is 
ever a doubter, tortured him with doubts. 

The only course was to go back and see. Adams, 
who doubted if his patient was physically fit for a march, 
at last gave in; the man’s agony of mind was more dan- 
gerous to him than the exhaustion of physical exercise 
could prove. He gave orders to the porters to strike camp, 
and then turned to himself, and helped them. They 
only carried what was barely needful, and was even less 
than needful, to take them to Fort M’Bassa, ten days 
journey in Berselius’s condition. Four water bottles 
that had been left intact they filled with water; they took 
the tent, and the pole that Felix had spliced. Cassava 
cakes and tinned meat and a few pounds of chocolate 
made up the provisions. There were no guns to carry, 
no trophies of the chase. Of all the army of porters only 
two wete left. Berselius was broken down, Felix had 
fled, they had no guide, and the crowning horror of the 
iking was that they had struck off in pursuit of the herd 
at right angles to the straight path they had taken from 
the forest, and Adams did not know in the least the point 
where they had struck off. The porters were absolutely 
no use as guides, and unless God sent a guide from 
heaven or chance interposed to lead them in the right 
way, they wete lost; for they had no guns or ammuni- 
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BEYOND THE SKYLINE 


179 

i 

* Truly the omen of the elephant lying down had not 
spoken in vain. 

When all was loaded up, and Adams was loaded even 
like the porters, they turned their backs on the tree 
and the pools, and leaving them there to burn in the 
sun forever struck straight west in the direction from 
which they had come. 

Berselius had come in pursuit of a terrible thing and 
a merciless thing; he was returning in search of a more 
terrible and a more merciless thing — Memory. 

It was four hours after sun-up when they left the camp; 
and two hours’ march brought them to that ridge which 
Berselius had indicated from the camp as being near the 
skyline. 

When they reached the ridge, and not before, Ber- 
selius halted and stared over the country in front of him, 
his face filled with triumph and hope. 

He seized Adams’s hand and pointed away to the west. 
The ridge gave a big view of the country. 

“I can remember all that,” said he, “keenly, right 
up to the skyline.” 

“And at the skyline ?” 

“Stands the mist,” replied Berselius. “But it will 
lift before me as I go on. Now I know it is only the 
sight of the things I have seen that is needful to recall 
the memory of them and of myself in connection with them. 

Adams said nothing. It struck him with an eerie 
feeling that this man beside him was actually walking 
back into his past. As veil after veil of distance was 
raised, so would the past come back, bit by bit. 










































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180 THE POOLS OF SILENCE 

But he was yet to learn what a terrible journey that 
would be. 

One thing struck him as strange. Berselius had 
never tried to pierce the mist by questions. The man 
seemed entirely obsessed by the curtain of mist, and 
by the necessity of piercing it by physical movement, 
of putting tree to tree and mile to mile. 

Berselius had not asked questions because, no doubt, 
he was under the dominion of a profound instinct, tell- 
ing him that the past he had lost could only be recalled 
by the actual picture of the things he had seen. 

































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CHAPTER XXIV 


THE SENTENCE OF THE DESERT 

B ERSELIUS had not asked a single question as to 
the catastrophe. His own misfortune had 
banished for him, doubtless, all interest in every- 
thing else. 

Adams had said to him nothing of Felix, his horrible 
deeds or his theft of the rifle. Felix, though he had 
vanished from Adams’s life completely and forever, had 
not vanished from the face of the earth. He was very 
much alive and doing, and his deeds and his fate are worth 
a word, for they formed a tragedy well fitting the stage 
of this merciless land. 

The Zappo Zap, having secured the gun and its ammu- 
nition, revelling in the joy of possession, and power, 
went skipping on his road, which lay to the northeast 
Six miles from the camp he flung himself down by a 
bush, and, with the gun covered by his arm, slept, and 
hunted in his sleep, like a hound, till dawn. 

Then he rose and pursued his way, still travelling 
northeast, his bird-like eyes skimming the land and 
horizon. He sang as he pursued his way, and his song 
fitted his filed teeth to a charm. If a poisoned arrow 
Could sing or a stabbing spear, it would sing what Felix 

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182 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


sang as he went, his long morning shadow stalking 
behind him; he as soulless and as heartless as it. 

What motive of attachment had driven him to follow 
Verhaeren to Yandjali from the Bena Pianga countrv 
heaven knows, for the man was quite beyond the human 
pale. The elephants were far, far above him in power 
of love and kindness; one had to descend straight to the 
alligators to match him, and even then one found one- 
self at fault. 

He was not. Those three words alone describe this 
figure of india rubber that could still walk and talk and 
live and lust, and to whom slaying and torture were 
amongst the aesthetics of life. 

An hour before noon, beyond and above a clump of 
trees, he sighted a moving object. It was the head of 
a giraffe. 

It was the very same bull giraffe that had fled with 
the elephant herd and then wheeled away south from it. 
It was wandering devious now, feeding by itself, and the 
instant Felix saw the tell-tale head, he dropped flat to the 
ground as if he had been shot. The giraffe had not seen 
him, for the head, having vanished for a moment, 
reappeared ; it was feeding, plucking down small branches 
of leaves, and Felix, lying on his side, opened the breech 
of the rifle, drew the empty cartridge case, inserted a 
cartridge in each barrel, and closed the breech. Now, 
unknown to Adams, when he had fired the gun the day 
before, there was a plug of clay in the left-hand barrel 
about two inches from the muzzle; just an inconsiderable 
wad of clay about as thick as a gun wad; the elephant 





THE SENTENCES OF THE DESERT 183 


folk had done this when they had mishandled the gun, 
and, though the thing could have been removed with a 
twig. Puck himself could not have conceived a more 
mischievous obstruction. He certainly never would 
have conceived so devilish a one. 

Adams had, fortunately for himself, fired the right- 
hand barrel; the concussion had not broken up the plug, 
for it was still moist, being clay from the trodden-up edge 
of the pool. It was moist still, for the night dew had 
found it. 

The Zappo Zap knew nothing of the plug. He knew 
nothing, either, of the tricks of these big, old-fashioned 
elephant guns, for he kept both barrels full cock, and it is 
almost three to two that if you fire one of these rifles 
with both barrels full cock, both barrels will go off 
simultaneously, or nearly so, from the concussion. 

With the gun trailing after him — another foolish 
trick — the savage crawled on his belly through the long 
grass to within firing distance of the tree clump. 

Then he lay and waited. 

He had not long to wait. 

The giraffe, hungry and feeding, was straying along 
the edge of the clump of trees, picking down the youngest 
and freshest leaves, just as a gourmet picks the best bits 
out of a salad. 

In a few minutes his body was in view, the endless 
neck flung up, the absurd head and little, stumpy, use- 
less horns prying amidst the leaves, and every now ftfld 
theft slewing round and sweeping the country in search 
df danger. 








































































































































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184 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


Felix lay motionless as a log; then, during a moment 
when the giraffe’s head was hidden in the leaves, he 
flung himself into position and took aim. 

A tremendous report rang out, the giraffe fell, squeal- 
ing, and roaring and kicking, and Felix, flung on his back, 
lay stretched out, a cloud of gauzy blue smoke in the air 
above him. 

The breech of the rifle had blown out. He had fired 
the right-hand barrel, but the concussion had sprung 
the left-hand cock as well. 

It seemed to the savage that a great black hand struck 
him in the face and flung him backward. He lay for 
a moment, half-stunned; then he sat up, and, behold! 
the sun had gone out and he was in perfect blackness. 

He was blind, for his eyes were gone, and where his 
nose had been was now a cavity. He looked as though 
he had put on a red velvet domino, and he sat there in the 
sun with the last vestige of the blue smoke dissolving 
above him in the air, not knowing in the least what had 
happened to him. 

He knew nothing of blindness; he knew little of pain. 
An Englishman in his wounded state would have been 
screaming in agony; to Felix the pain was sharp, but 
it was nothing to the fact that the sun had “gone down.” 

He put his hand to the pain and felt his ruined face, 
but that did not tell him anything. 

This sudden black dark was not the darkness which 
came from shutting one’s eyes; it was something else, 
&nd he scrambled on his feet to find out. 

He could feel the darkness now, and he advanced a 
























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THE SENTENCES OF THE DESERT 185 


few steps to see if he could walk through it; then he 
sprang into the air to see if it was lighter above, and 
dived on his hands and knees to see if he could slip under 
it, and shouted and whooped to see if he could drive it 
away. 

But it was a great darkness, not to be out-jumped, 
jumped he as high as the sun, or slipped under, were 
he as thin as a knife, or whooped away, though he 
whooped to everlasting. 

He walked rapidly, and then he began to run. He 
ran rapidly, and he seemed to possess some instinct in his 
feet which told him of broken ground. The burst gun 
lay where he had left it in the grass, and the dead giraffe 
lay where it had fallen by the trees; the wind blew, and 
the grass waved, the sun spread his pyramid of light 
from horizon to horizon, and in the sparkle above a black 
dot hung trembling above the stricken beast at the edge 
of the wood. 

The black figure of the man continued its headlong 
course. It was running in a circle of many miles, impelled 
through the nothingness of night by the dark soul rag- 
ing in it. 

Hours passed, and then it fell, and lay face to the sky 
and arms outspread. You might have thought it dead. 
But it was a thing almost indestructible. It lay motion- 
less, but it was alive with hunger. 

During all its gyrations it had been followed and 
watched closely. It had not lain for a minute when a 
vulture dropped like a stone from the sky and lit on it 
with wings outspread. 




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1&6 

Next moment the vulture was seized, screeching, torn, 
limb from limb, and in the act of being devoured ! 

But the sentence of the desert on the blind is death, 
trap vultures as cunningly as you will, and devour them 
as ferociously. The eye is everything in the battle of 
the strong against the weak. And so it came about that 
two days later a pair of leopards from the woods to the 
north east fought with the figure, which fought with 
teeth and hands and feet, whilst the yellow-eyed kites 
looked on at a battle that would have turned with horror 
the heart of Flamininus. 























































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CHAPTER XXV 

TOWARD THE SUNSET 

W HEN BerSelius, standing on the ridge, had 
looked long enough at the country before 
him, taking in its every detail with delight, 
they started again on their march, Berselius leading. 

They had no guide. The only plan in Adams’s head 
was to march straight west toward the sunset for a dis- 
tance roughly equivalent to the forced march they had 
made in pursuit of the herd, and then to strike at right 
angles due north and try to strike the wood isthmus of 
the two great forests making up the forest of M’Bonga. 

But the sunset is a wide mark and only appears at 
sunset. They had no compass; the elephant folk had 
made away with all the instruments of the expedition. 
They must inevitably stray from the true direction strik- 
ing into that infernal circle which imprisons all things 
blind and all things compassless. Even should they, by 
a miracle, strike the isthmus of woods, the forest would 
take them, confuse them, hand them from tree to tree 
and glade to glade, and lose them at last and for ever 
in one of the million pockets which a forest holds open 
for the lost. 

The stout heart of the big man had not quailed before 
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188 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


this prospect. He had a fighting chance; that was 
enough for him. But now at the re-start, as Berselius 
stepped forward and took the lead, a hope sprang up in 
his breast. A tremendous and joyful idea occurred to' 
him. Was it possible that Berselius would guide them 
back ? 

The memory that the man possessed was so keen, his 
anxiety to pierce the veil before him was so overpowering, 
was it possible that like a hound hunting by sight instead 
of smell, he would lead them straight ? 

Only by following the exact track they had come by, 
could Berselius pierce back into that past he craved to see. 
Only by putting tree to tree and ridge to ridge, memory 
to memory, could he collect what he had lost. 

Could he do this ? 

The life of the whole party depended upon the answer 
to that question. 

The track they ought to follow was the track by which 
the herd had led them. Adams could not tell whether 
they were following that track — even Felix could scarcely 
have told — for the dew and the wind had made the faint 
traces of the elephants quite indiscernible now to civilized 
eyes; and Berselius never once looked at the ground under 
his feet, he was led entirely by the configuration of the 
land. That to the eyes of Adams was hopeless. For 
the great elephant country is all alike, and one ridge is 
the counterpart of another ridge, and one grassy plain 
of another grassy plain, and the scattered trees tell you 
nothing when you are lost, except that you are lost. 

The heat of the day was now strong on the land; the 









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TOWARD THE SUNSET 


189 


porters sweated under their loads, and Adams, loaded 
like them, knew for once in his life what it was to be a 
slave and a beast of burden. 

Berselius, who carried nothing, did not seem to feel 
the heat; weak though he must have been from his injury 
and the blood-letting. He marched on, ever on, apparently 
satisfied and well pleased as horizon lifted, giving place 
to new horizon, and plain of waving grass succeeded 
ridge of broken ground. 

But Adams, as hour followed hour, felt the hope dying 
out in his breast, and the remorseless certainty stole upon 
him that they were out of their track. This land seemed 
somehow different from any he had seen before; he could 
have sworn that this country around them was not the 
country through which they had pursued the herd. His 
hope had been built on a false foundation. How could a 
man whose memory was almost entirely obscured 
lead them right? This was not the case of the blind 
leading the blind, but the case of the blind leading men 
with sight. 

Berselius was deceiving himself. Hope was leading 
him, not memory. 

And still Berselius led on, assured and triumphant* 
calling out, “See! do you remember that tree? We 
passed it at just this distance when we were conlih^l 
Or, now, “Look at that patch of blue grass. We halted 
for a minute here.” 

Adams, after a while, made no reply. The assurance 
and delight of Berselius as these fancied memories came 
to him shocked the heart. There was a horrible and 












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190 THE POOLS OP SILENCE 

\ 

sardonic humour in the whole business, a bathos that 
insulted the soul. 

The dead leading the living, the blind leading the 
man with sight, lunacy leading sanity to death. 

Yet there was nothing to be done but follow. As 
well take Berselius’s road as any other. Surse would 
tell them whether they were facing the sunset; but he 
wished that Berselius would cease. 

The situation was bad enough to bear without those 
triumphant calls. 

It was past noon now; the light wind that had been 
blowing in their faces had died away; there was the faint- 
est stirring of the air, and on this, suddenly, to Adams’s 
nostrils came stealing a smell of corruption, such as he 
had never experienced before. 

It grew stronger as they went. 

There was a slight rise in the ground before them just 
here, and as they took it the stench became almost insup- 
portable, and Adams was turning aside to spit when a cry 
from Berselius, who was a few yards in advance, brought 
him forward to his side. 

The rise in the ground had hidden from them a dried-up 
t v iver-bed> and there before them in the sandy trough, huge 
amidst the boulders > lay the body of an elephant. 

A crowd of birds busy about the carcass rose clamour- 
ing in the air and flew away. 

“Do you remember?” cried Berselius. 

“Good God!” said Adams. “Do I remember!^ 

It was the body of the great beast they had passed when 
in pursuit of the herd. 





























































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TOWARD THE SUNSET 


191 


Yes, there was no doubt now that Berselius was guid- 
ing them aright. He had followed the track they had 
tome by without deviating a hundred yards. 

The great animal was lying just as they had left it, but 
the work of the birds was evident; horribly so, and it 
was not a sight to linger over. 

They descended into the river bed, passed up the other 
bank, and went on, Berselius leading and Adams walking 
by his side. 

“Do you know,” said Adams, “I was beginning to 
think you w r ere out of the track.” 

Berselius smiled. 

Adams, who was glancing at his face, thought that he 
had never seen -an expression like that on the man’s face 
before. The smile of the lips that had marked and 
marred his countenance through life, the smile that was 
half a sneer, was not there; this came about the eyes. 

“He was in exactly the same position, too,” said Adams. 
“But, the birds will have him down before long. Well, 
he has served one purpose in his life; he has shown us 
we are on the right road, and he has given you back 
another bit of memory.” 

“Poor brute/’ said Berselius. 

These words, coming from the once iron-hearted 
Berselius, struck Adams strangely; there was a trace of 
pity in their tone. 


















































































































































































































































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CHAPTER XXVI 


THE FADING MIST 

T HEY camped two hours before sundown. One of 
the few mercies of this country is the number of 
dead trees and the bushes from which one can 
always scrape the materials for a fire. 

Adams, with his hunting knife and a small hatchet 
which was all steel and so had been uninjured in the 
catastrophe, cut wood enough for the fire. They had 
nothing to cook with, but fortunately the food they had 
with them did not require cooking. 

The tent was practicable, for the pole, so well had 
it been spliced, was as good as new. They set it up, 
and having eaten their supper, crept under it, leaving the 
porters to keep watch or not as they chose. 

Berselius, who had marched so well all day, had broken 
down at the finish. He seemed half dead with weariness, 
and scarcely spoke a word, eating mechanically and 
falling to sleep immediately on lying down. 

But he was happy. Happy as the man wha suddfeftJ# 
finds that he can outwalk the paralysis threatening hinn 
or the man who finds the fog of blindness lifting before 
him* showing him again bit by bit the world he had 
deemed forever lost. Whilst this man sleeps in the tent 



THE FADING MIST 


193 


beside his companion and the waning moon breaks up 
over the horizon and mixes her light with the red flicker 
of the fire, a word about that past of which he was in 
search may not be out of place. 

Berselius was of mixed nationality. His father of 
Swedish descent, his mother of French. 

Armand Berselius the elder was what is termed a lucky 
man. In other words, he had that keenness of intellect 
which enables the possessor to seize opportunities and to 
foresee events. ' 

This art of looking into the future is the key to Aladdin’s 
Palace and to the Temple of Power. To know what will 
appreciate in value and what will depreciate, that is the 
art of success in life, and that was the art which made 
Armand Berselius a millionaire. 

Berselius the younger grew up in an atmosphere of 
money. His mother died when he was quite young. He 
had neither brothers nor sisters; his father, a chilly-hearted 
sensualist, had a dislike to the boy; for some obscure 
reason, without any foundation in fact, he fancied that he 
was some other man’s son. 

The basis of an evil mind is distrust. Beware of 
the man who is always fearful of being swindled. Who 
cannot trust, cannot be trusted. 

Berselius treated his son like a brute, and the bo>> 
with great power for love in his heart, conceived a hatred 
for the man who misused him that was hellish in intensity. 

But not a sign of it did he show. That power of will 
and restraint so remarkable in the grown-up man was 
not less remarkable in the boy. He bound his hate with 


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194 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


iron bands and prisoned it, and he did this from pride. 
When his father thrashed him for the slightest offence, he 
showed not a sign of pain or passion, when the old man 
committed that last outrage one can commit against the 
mind of a child, and sneered at him before grown-up 
people, young Berselius neither flushed nor moved an eye- 
lid. He handed the insult to the beast feeding at his 
heart, and it devoured it and grew. 

The spring was poisoned at its source. 

That education of the heart which only love can give 
was utterly cut off from the boy and supplanted by the 
education of hate. 

And the mind tainted thus from the beginning was an 
extraordinary mind, a spacious intellect, great for evil 
or great for good, never little, and fed by an unfailing 
flood of energy. 

The elder Berselius, as if bent on the utter damnation 
of his son, kept him well supplied with money. He did 
this from pride. 

The young man took his graduate degree in vice, with 
higher marks from the devil than any other young man 
of his time. He passed through the college of St. Cyr 
and into the cavalry, leaving it at the death of his father 
•and when he had obtained his captaincy. 

He now found himself free, without a profession and 
with forty million francs to squander, or save, or do what 
he liked with. 

He at once took his place as a man of affairs with one 
hand in politics and the other in finance. There are a 
dozen men like Berselius on the Continent of Europe, 



THE FADING MIST 


195 


Politicians and financiers under the guise of Boulevardiers 
Men of leisure apparently, but, in reality, men of intellect, 
who work their politcal and financial works quite unob- 
trusively and yet have a considerable hand in the making 
of events. 

Berselius was one of these, varying the monotony of 
social life with periodic returns to the wilderness. 

With the foundation of the Congo State by King 
Leopold, Berselius saw huge chances of profit. He 
knew the country, for he had hunted there. He knew 
the ivory, the copal, and the palm oil resources of the 
place, and in the rubber vines he guessed an untapped 
source of boundless wealth. He saw the great difficulty 
in the way of making this territory a paying concern; that 
is to say, he saw the labour question. Europeans would 
not do the work; the blacks would not, unless paid, and 
even then inefficiently. 

To keep up a large force of European police to make 
the blacks work on European terms, was out of the 
question, The expense would run away with half the 
profits; the troops would die, and, worst of all* other 
nations would say* “What are you doing with that huge 
army of men?” The word “slavery” had to be 
eliminated from the proceedings* else the conscience of 
Europe would be touched. He foresaw this* and he was 
lost in admiration at the native police idea. The strS&e 
t>f genius that collected all the Felixes of the Congo basin 
into an army of darkness, and collected all the weak and 
defenceless into a herd of slaves, was a stroke after his 
Own heart. 
















































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196 


THE POOLS OF SILANCE 


Of the greatest murder syndicates the world has ever 
seen Berselius became a memHer. He was not invited 
to the bloody banquet — he invited himself. 

He had struck the Congo in a hunting expedition; 
he had seen and observed; later on, during a second 
expedition, he had seen the germination of Leopold’s idea. 
He dropped his gun and came back to Europe. 

He was quite big enough to have smashed the whole 
infernal machinery then and there. America had not 
yet hoodwinked, signed the licence to kill, which she 
handed to Leopold on the of April, ^ 1884. 

Germany had not been roped in. England and France 
Were still aloof, and Berselius, arriving at the psychological 
moment, did not mince matters. 

The result was two million pounds to his credit during 
the next ten years. 

So much for Berselius and his past, 
jf An hour after dawn next day they started. The 
morning was windless, warm, and silent, and the sun 
shining broad on the land cast their shadows before 
them as they went, the porters with their loads piled 
*6n their heads, Adams carrying the tent-pole and tent, 
Berselius leading. 

He had recovered from his weakness of the night before. 
He had almost recovered his strength, and he felt that 
newness of being which the convalescent feels — that 
feeling of new birth into the old world which pays one, 
; almost, for the pains of the past sickness. 

Never since his boyhood had Berselius felt that keen 
pleasure in the sun and the blue sky and the grass undei: 

















































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THE FADING MIST 


197 


his feet; but it called up no memories of boyhood, for the 
mist was still there, hiding boyhood and manhood and 
everything up to the skyline. 

But the mist did not frighten him now. He had 
found a means of dispelling it; the photographic plates 
were all there unbroken, waiting only to be collected and 
put together, and he felt instinctively that after a time, 
when he had collected a certain number, the brain would 
gain strength, and all at once the mist would vanish for- 
ever, and he would be himself again. 

Three hours after the start they passed a broken- 
down tree. 

Adams recognized it at once as the tree they had passed 
on the hunt, shortly after turning from their path to follow 
the herd of elephants. 

Berselius was still leading them straight, and soon 
they would come to the crucial point — the spot 
where they had turned at right angles to follow the 
elephants. 

Would Berselius remember and turn, or would he 
get confused and go on in a straight line ? 

The question was answered in another twenty minutes 
by Berselius himself. 

He stopped dead and waved his arm with a sweeping 
motion to include all the country to the north. 

“We came from there, ” he said, indicating the north. 
“We struck the elephant spoor just here, and turned due 
west.” 

“How on earth do you know?” asked Adams. “I 
'can’t see any indication, and for the life of me I could n’t 


















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198 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


tell where we turned or whether we came from there,’ * 
indicating the north, “or there,” pointing to the south. 
“ How do you know ? ” 

“How do I know?” replied Berselius. “Why, this 
place and everything we reach and pass is as vivid to 
nte as if I had passed it only two minutes ago. It hits 
me with such vividness that it blinds me. It is that which 
I believe makes the mist. The things I can see are so 
exti a ordinarily vivid that they hide everything else. My 
brain seems new born — every memory that comes back 
to it comes back glorious in strength. If there were gods, 
they would see as I see.” 

A wind had arisen and it blew from the northwest. 
Berselius inhaled it triumphantly. 

Adams stood watching him. This piece-bv-piece 
return of memory, this rebuilding of the past foot by foot, 
mile by mile, and horizon by horizon, was certainly the 
strangest phenomenon of the brain that he had ever 
come across. 

This thing occurs in civilized life, but then it is far 
less striking, for the past comes to a man from a hundred 
close points — a thousand familiar things in his house or 
surroundings call to him when he is brought back to them; 
but here in the great, lone elephant land, the only familiar 
thing was the track they had followed and the country 
around it. If Berselius had been taken off that track and 
placed a few miles away, he would have been as lost as 
Adams. 

They wheeled to the north, following in their leader’s 
footsteps. 






















































































































































THE FADING MIST 


199 


That afternoon, late, they camped by the same pool 
near which Berselius had shot the rhinos. 

Adams, to make sure, walked away to where the great 
bull had fought the cow before being laid low by the rifle 
of the hunter. 

The bones were there* picked clean and bleached, 
exemplifying the eternal hunger of the desert, which is 
one of the most horrible facts in life. These two great 
brutes had been left nearly whole a few days ago; tons 
of flesh had vanished like snow in sunshine, mist in 
morning. 

But Adams, as he gazed at the colossal bones, was 
not thinking of that; the marvel of their return filled his 
mind as he looked from the skeletons to where, against 
the evening blue, a thin wreath of smoke rose up from 
the camp fire which the porters had lighted. 

Far away south, so far away as to be scarcely discernible* 
a bird was sailing along, sliding on the wind without a 
motion of the wings. It passed from sight and left the 
sky stainless, and the land lay around silent with the tre- 
mendous silence of evening, and lifeless as the bones 
bleaching at his feet. 
























































































































































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CHAPTER XXVII 


I AM THE FOREST 


T HE day after the next, two hours before noon, 
they passed an object which Adams remembered 
well. 

It was the big tree which Berselius had pointed out 
to him as having been tusked by an elephant; and an 
hour after they had started from the mid-day rest, the 
horizon to the north changed and grew dark. 

It was the forest. 

The sky immediately above the dark line, from con- 
trast, was extraordinarily bright and pale, and, as they 
marched, the line lifted and the trees grew. 

“Look!” said Berselius. 

“I see,” replied Adams. 

A question was troubling his mind. Would Berselius 
be able to guide them amidst the trees ? Here in the 
open he had a hundred tiny indications on either side 
of him, but amidst the trees how could he find his way? 
Was it possible that memory could lead him through that 
labyrinth once it grew dense ? 

It will be remembered that it was a two days’ march 
from Fort M’Bassa through the isthmus of woods to 
the elephant country. At the edge, of the forest the trees 
200 























































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I AM THE FOREST 


201 


were very thinly set, but for the rest, and a day’s march 
from the fort, it was jungle. 

Would Berselius be able to penetrate that jungle? 
Tijne would tell. Berselius knew nothing about it; he 
only knew what lay before his sight. 

Toward evening the trees came out to meet them, 
baobab and monkey-bread, set widely apart; and they 
camped by a pool and lit their fire, and slept as men sleep 
in the pure air of the woods and the desert. 

Next morning they pursued their journey, Berselius 
still confident. At noon, however, he began to exhibit 
slight signs of agitation and anxiety. The trees were 
thickening around them; he still knew the way, but the 
view before him was getting shorter and shorter as the 
trees thickened; that is to say, the mist was coming closer 
and closer. He knew nothing of the dense jungle before 
them; he only knew that the clear road in front of him 
yas shortening up rapidly and horribly, and that if it 
continued to do so it would inevitably vanish. 

? The jov that had filled his heart became transformed 
to the grief which the man condemned to blindness feels 
jyhen he sees the bright world fading from his sights 
slowly but surely as the expiring flame of a lamp. 

I He walked more rapidly, and the more rapidly he went 
the shorter did the road before him grow, 
j All at once the forest — which had been playing, up to 
f this, with Berselius as a cat plays with a mouse — all a* 
once the forest, like a great green Sphinx, put down its 
great green paw and spoke from its cavernous heart 

“ I am the Forest.” 





























































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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


202 

They had passed almost at a step into the labyrinths . 
Plantain leaves hit them insolently in the face, lianas 
hung across their path like green ropes placed to bar 
them out, weeds tangled the foot. 

Berselius, like an animal that finds itself trapped, 
plunged madly forward. Adams following closely be- ' 
hind heard him catching back his breath with a sob. 
They plunged on for a few yards, and then Berselius 
stood still. 

The forest was very silent, and seemed listening. The 
evening light and the shade of the leaves cast gloom around 
them. Adams could hear his own heart thumping and 
the breathing of the porters behind him. If Berselius 
had lost his way, then they were lost indeed. 

After a moment Berselius spoke, as a man speaks whose 
every hope in life is shattered. 

“The path is gone.” 

Adams’s only reply was a deep intake of the breath. 

“There is nothing before me. I am lost.” 

“Shall we try back ?” said Adams, speaking in that 
hard tone which conies when a man is commanding his 
voice. 

“Back? Of what use? I cannot go back; I 
go forward. But here there is nothing.” 

The unhappy man’s voice was terrible to hear. He 
had marched so triumphantly all day, drawing nearer 
at each step to himself, to that self which memory had 
hidden from him and which memory was disclosing bit 
by bit. And now the march was interrupted as if by 
a \vall set across his path. 



I AM THE FOREST 


203 


But Adams was of a type of man to whom despondency 
may be known, but never despair. 

They had marched all day; they were lost, it is true, but 
they were not far, now, from Fort M’Bassa. The imme- 
diate necessity was rest and food. 

There was a little clearing amidst the trees just here, 
and with his own hands he raised the tent. They had no 
fire, but the moon when she rose, though in her last quarter, 
lit up the forest around them with a green glow-worm 
glimmer. One could see the lianas and the trees, the 
broad leaves shining with dew, some bright, some sketched 
in dimly, and all bathed in gauze green lights and they 
'-could hear the drip and patter of dew on leaf and branch. 

This is a mournful sound — the most mournful of all 
Ihe sounds that fill the great forests of the Congo. It 
is so casual, so tearful. One might fancy it the sound 
of the forest weeping to itself in the silence of the night. 


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CHAPTER XXVIII 


GOD SENDS A GUIDE 


be lost in the desert or in a land like the elephant 
country is bad r but to be lost in the dense parts 
of the tropical forest is far worse. 

You are in a horrible labyrinth, a maze, not of intricate 
paths but of blinding curtains. I am speaking now of that 
arrogant jungle, moist and hot, where life is in full ferment, 
and where the rubber vine grows and thrives; where you 
go knee-deep in slush and catch at a tree-bole to pre- 
vent yourself going farther, cling, sweating at every pore 
and shivering like a dog, feeling for firmer ground and 
finding it, only to be led on to another quagmire. The 
bush pig avoids this place, the leopard shuns it; it is 
bad in the dry season when the sun gives some light 
by day, and the moon a gauzy green glimmer by night, 
but in the rains it is terrific. Night, then, is black as 
the inside of a trunk, and day is so feeble that vour hand, 
held before your face at arm's length, is just a shadow!* 
The westward part of the forest of M’Bonga projects a 
spur of the pestiferous rubber-bearing land into the 
isthmus of healthy woods. It was just at the tip of 
this spur that Berseliiis and his party were entangled 
and lost. 
































































































































































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GOD SENDS A GUIDE 


€05 


The two porters were Yandjali men, they knew noth- 
jng^f these woods, and were utterly useless as guides; 
they sat now amidst the leaves near the tent eating their 
food; dark shadows in the glow-worm light, the glisten- 
ing black skin of a knee or shoulder showing up touched 
by the glimmer in which leaf and liana, tree trunk and 
branch, seemed like marine foliage bathed in the watery 
light of a sea- cave. 

Adams had lit a pipe, and he sat beside Berselius at 
the opening of the tent, smoking. The glare of the match 
had shown him the face of Berselius for a moment. 
Berselius, since his first outcry on finding the path gone, 
had said little, and there was a patient and lost look on 
his face, sad but most curious to see. Most curious, 
for it said fully what a hundred little things had been 
hinting since their start from the scene of the catas- 
trophe — that the old Berselius had vanished and a new 
Berselius had taken his place. Adams had at first put 
down the change in his companion to weakness, but the 
weakness had passed, the man’s great vitality had 
reasserted itself, and the change was still there. 

This was not the man who had engaged him in Paris; 
this person might have been a mild twin-brother of the 
redoubtable Captain of the Avenue Malakoff, of Matadi 
and Yandjali. When memory came fully back, would it 
bring with it the old Berselius, or would the new Berselius, 
mild, inoffensive, and kindly, suddenly find himself 
burdened with the tremendous past of the man he once 
had been ? 

Nothing is more true than that the human mind from 



206 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


accident, from grief, or from that mysterious excite- 
ment, during which in half an hour a blaspheming 
costermonger “gets religion” and becomes a saint of 
God — nothing is more certain than that the human 
mind can like this, at a flash, turn topsy-turvy; the good 
coming to the top, the bad going to the bottom. Mechan- 
ical pressure on the cortex of the brain can bring this 
state of things about, even as it can convert a saint of God 
into a devil incarnate. 

Was Berselius under the influence of forced amend- 
ment of this sort ? 

Adams was not even considering the matter, he was 
lost in gloomy thoughts. - 

Lie was smoking slowly, holding his index and middle 
fingers over the pipe-bowl to prevent the tobacco burn- 
ing too quickly, for he had only a couple of pipefuls 
left. He was thinking that to-morrow evening the pouch 
wotild be empty, when, from somewhere in the forest 
near by, there came a sound which brought him to his 
feet and the two porters up on hands and knees like 
listening dogs. 

It was the sound of a human voice raised in a sort 
of chant, ghostly and mournful as the sound of the fall- 
ing dew. As it came, rising and falling, monotonous and 
rhythmical, the very plain song of desolation, Adams 
felt his hair lift and his flesh crawl, till one of the porters, 
springing erect from his crouching position, sent his 
voice through the trees — 

“Ahi ahee!” 

The song ceased; and then, a moment later, faint 

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GOD SENDS A GUIDE 207 

&nd wavering, and like the voice of a sea-gull, came: 
the reply — 

“Alii ahee!” 

“Man,” said the porter, turning white eyeballs and 
IjhhU&g teeth over his shoulder at Adams. 

He called again, and again came the reply. 

“Quick,” said Adams, seizing the arm of Berselius, 
who had risen, “there ’s a native here somewhere about, 
he may guide us out of this infernal place; follow me, and 
for God’s sake keep close.” 

Holding Berselius by the arm, and motioning the 
other native to follow, he seized the porter by the shoulder 
and pushed him forward. The man knew what was 
required and obeyed, advancing, calling, and listening 
by turns, till, at last, catching the true direction of the- 
sound he went rapidly, Berselius and Adams following 
close behind. Sometimes they were half up to the knees 
in boggy patches, fighting their way through leaves that 
struck them like great wet hands; sometimes the call in 
the distance seemed farther away, and they held their 
pace, they held their breath, they clung to each other, 
listening, till, now, by some trick of the trees, though 
they had not moved and though there was no wind, the* 
cry came nearer. 

“Ahi, ahee!” 

Then, at last, a dim red glow shone through the foliage 
before them and bursting their way through the leaves 
they broke into an open space where, alone, by a small 
fire of dry branches and brushwood, sat a native, stark 
naked, except for a scrap of dingy loincloth, and looking 























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208 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


like a black gnome, a faun of this horrible place, and 
the very concretion of its desolation and death. 

He was sitting when they caught their first glimpse 
of him, with his chin supported on his hand, but the 
instant he saw the faces of the white men he rose 
as if to escape, then the porter called out some- 
thing that reassured him, and he sat down again 
and shivered. 

He was one of the rubber collectors. He had reached 
this spot the day before,, and had built himself a shelter 
of leaves and branches. He would be here for ten days 
or a fortnight, and his food, chiefly cassava, lay in a little 
pile in the shelter, covered over with leaves. 

The porter continued speaking to the collector, who, 
now regaining the use of his limbs, stood up before the 
white men, hands folded in front of -him, and his eyes 
rolling from Berselius to Adams. 

“M’Bassa,” said Adams, touching the porter, point- 
ing to the collector, arid then away into the forest in the 
direction he fancied Fort M’Bassa to be. 

The porter understood. He said a few words to the 
‘‘collector, who nodded his head furiously and struck 
himself on the breast with his open hand. 

Then the porter turned again to Adams. 

“M’Bassa,” said he, nodding his head, pointing to tSjfc 
collector, and then away into the forest. 

That was all, but it meant that they were saved. 

Adams gave a great whoop that echoed away through 
the trees, startling bats and birds in the branches and 
losing itself without an echo in the depths of the 





















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GOD SENDS A GUIDE 209 

gloom. Then he struck himself a blow on the chest 
with his fist. 

“My God!” said he, “the tent!” 

They had only travelled an eighth of a mile or so from 
the camping place, but they had wandered this way and 
that before the porter had found the true direction of the 
call, and the tent, provisions, and everything else were 
lost as utterly and irrevocably as though they had been 
dropped in mid-ocean. 

To step aside from a thing — even for a hundred 
yards — in this terrible place was to lose it; even the 
rubber collectors, from whom the forest holds few 
Secrets have, in these thick places, to blaze a trail by 
breaking branches, tying lianas and marking tree 
trunks. 

“True*” said Berselius in a weary voice, “we have 
lost even that.” 

“No matter,” said Adams, “we have got a guide. 
Cheer up, this man will take us to Fort M’Bassa and 
there you will find the road again.” 

“Are you sure?” said Berselius, a touch of hope 
in his voice. 

“Sure? Certain. You’ve forgotten Fort M’Bassa. 
Well, when you see it, you will remember it, and it will 
lead you right away home. Cheer up, cheer up, we ’ve 
got a fire and a bit of shelter for you to sleep under, and 
we ’ll start bright and early in the morning, and this 
black imp of Satan will lead you straight back to your road 
and your memory — hey! Uncle Joe!” 

He patted the collector on the naked shoulder and 







































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210 THE POOLS OF SILENCE 

a faint grin appeared on that individual’s forlorn coun- 
tenance; never had he come across a white man like this 
before. Then, bustling about, Adams piled up the fire 
with more sticks, got Berselius under the shelter of the 
collector’s wretched hut, sat himself down close to the fire, 
produced his pipe, and proceeded, in one glorious debauch 
to finish the last of his tobacco. 

This rubber collector, the blast and the humblest 
creature on earth, had given them fire and shelter, they 
were also to be beholden to him for food. His wretched 
cassava cakes and his calabash of water gave them their 
breakfast next morning, and then they started, the col- 
lector leading, walking before them through the dense 
growth of the trees as assuredly as a man following a 
well-known road. It was a terrible thing for him to 
leave his post, but the white men were from M’Bassa and 
wished to return to M’Bassa, and M’Bassa was the head 
centre of his work and the terrible Mecca of his fears. 
White men from there and going to there must be obeyed. 

This was the last phase of the great hunt. Berselius 
had been slowly stripped by the wilderness of every- 
thing now but the clothes he stood up in, his companion 
and two porters. Guns, equipment, tents, stoye&r^l 
Zappo Zap, and the army of men under that fero<?i<3\ls 
lieutenant, had all ‘‘gone dam.” He was mud to the 
knees, his clothing was torn, he was mud to the elbows 
from having tripped last night and fallen in a quagmire, 
his face was white and drawn and grimy as the face of a 
London cabrunner, his hair was grayer and dull, but his 
eyes were bright and he was happy. At M’Bassa he would 








































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GOD SENDS A GUIDE 


211 


be put upon the road again — the only road to the thing he 
craved for as burning Dives craved for water — himself. 

But it was ordained that he should find that ques- 
tionably desirous person before reaching M’Bassa. 

They had been on the march for an hour when Adams, 
fussing like a person who is making his first journey by 
rail, stopped the guide to make sure he was leading them 
right. 

“M’Bassa?” said Adams. 

“M’Bassa,” replied the other, nodding his head. 
Then with outspread hand he pointed before them and 
made a semicircular sweep to indicate that he was lead- 
ing them for some reason by a circuitous route. 

He was making, in fact, for open ground that tybtlW 
bring them in the direction of the fort by a longeHtfut 
much easier road than a direct line through the jungle. 
He was making also for water, for his scant supply had 
been exhausted by his guests, and he knew the road he 
was taking would lead him to broad pools of water. 
Adams nodded his head to imply that he understood, 
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CHAPTER XXX 


THE VISION OF THE POOLS 

S OMEWHERE about noon they halted for a rest 
and some food. It was less boggy here, and 
the sunlight showed stronger through the dense 
roof of foliage. The cassava cakes were tainted with 
must, and they had no water, but the increasing light 
made them forget everything but the freedom that was 
opening before them. 

Adams pointed to the empty valabash "which their 
guide carried, and th^coiPectbr nodded and pointed before 
them, as if to imply that soon they would come to water 
and that all would be well. 

Now, as they resumed their way, the trees altered 
and drew farther apart, the ground was solid under 
foot, and through the foliage of the euphorbia and 
raphia palm came stray glimmers of sunshine, bits of 
blue sky, birds, voices, and the whisper of a breeze. 
“This is better,” said Berselius. 

Adams flung up his head and expanded his nostrils. 
“Better, my God!” said he, “this is heaven !“ 

It was heaven, indeed, after that hell of gloom; that 
bog roofed in with leaves, the very smell of which clings 
to one for ever like the memory of a fever dream. 


































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VISION OF THE POOLS 


2 13 


All at once patches of sunlight appeared in front as 
well as above. They quickened their pace, the trees 
drew apart, and, suddenly, with theatrical effect, a park- 
like sward of land lay before them leading to a sheet 
of blue water reflecting tall feather-palms and waving 
spear-grass, all domed over with blue, and burning in 
the bright, bright sunshine. 

“The Silent Pools!” cried Adams. “The very place 
where I saw the leopard chasing the antelope! Great 
Scott! — Hi! hi! hi! you there! — where are you going?” 

The collector had raced down to the water’s edge; 
he knew the dangers of the place, for he divided the 
grass, filled his calabash with water, and dashed back 
before anything could seize him. Then, without drink- 
ing, he came running with the calabash to the white 
men. @ 

Adams handed the calabash first to his companion. 

Berselius drank and then wiped his forehead; he 
seemed disturbed in his mind and had a dazed look. 

He had never come so far along the edge of the pools 
as this, but there was something in the configuration 
of the place that stirred his sleeping memory. 

“What is it?” asked Adams. 

“I don’t know,” replied Berselius. I hive dreitiMt 
— I have seen — I remember something sl °ttile* 

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where ” 

Adams laughed. 

“I know,” said he, “you come along, and in a few 
minutes you will see something that will help your mem- 
ory. Why* man* we camped near here, you and I and 






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214 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


Meeus; when you see the spot you ’ll find yourself on your 
road again. Come, let ’s make a start.” 

The collector was standing with the half-full calabash 
in his hands. 

He had not dared to drink. Adams nodded to him, 
motioning him to do so, but he handed it first to the porter. 
Then, when the porter had drunk, the collector finished 
the remains of the water and the last few drops he flung 
on the ground, an offering, perhaps, to some god or devil 
of his own. Then he led on, skirting the water’s edge. 
The loveliness of the place had not lessened since Adams 
had seen it last, even the breeze that was blowing to-day 
did not disturb the spirit of sweet and profound peace 
which held in a charm this lost garden of the wilderness; 
the palms bent as if in sleep, the water dimpled to the 
breeze and seemed to smile, a flamingo, with rose-coloured 
wings, passed and flew before them and vanished beyond 
the rocking tops of the trees that still sheltered the camp- 
ing place where once Berselius had raised his tent. 

Again, with theatrical effect, as the pools had burst 
Upon them on leaving the forest, the camping place 
Unveiled itself. 

“Now,” said Adams in triumph, “do you remember 
that ?” 

Berselius did not reply. He was walking along with 
his eyes fixed straight before him. He did not stop % 
or hesitate, or make any exclamation to indicate whether 
he remembered or not. 

“Do you remember?” cried Adams. 

But Berselius did not speak. He was making noises 





























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VISION OF THE POOLS 


215 


as if strangling, and suddenly his hands flew up to the 
neck of his hunting shirt, and tore at it till he tore it open. 

“Steady, man, steady,” cried Adams catching the 
other’s arm. “Hi you ’ll be in a fit if you don't mind — 
steady, I say” 

But Berselius heard nothing, knew nothing but the 
scene before him, and Adams, who was running now 
after the afflicted man, who had broken away and was 
making straight for the trees beneath which the village 
had once been, heard and knew nothing of what lay before 
and around Berselius. 

Berselius had stepped out of the forest an innocent 
man, and behold ! memory had suddenly fronted him 
with a hell in which he was the chief demon. 

He had no time to accommodate himself to the situa- 
tion, no time for sophistry. He was not equipped with 
the forty-years of steadily growing callousness that had 
vanished; the fiend who had inspired him with the lust 
for torture had deserted him. and the sight and the knowl- 
edge of himself came as suddenly as a blow in the face. 

Under that m’bina tree two soldiers, one with the 
haft of a blood-stained knife between his teeth, had 
mutilated horribly a living girl. Little Papeete had 
been decapitated just where his skull lav now; the shrieks 
and wails of the tortured tore the sky above Berselius; 
but Adams heard nothing and saw nothing but Berselius 
raving amidst the remains. 

Bones lay here and bones lay there, clean picked by 
the vultures and white bleached by the sun; skulls, jaw- 
bones, femurs, broken or whole. The remains of the 
















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216 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


miserable huts faced the strewn and miserable bones, 
and the trees blew their golden trumpets over all. 

As Adams looked from the man who with shrill cries 
was running about as a frantic woman runs about, to 
the bones on the ground, he guessed the tragedy of 
Berselius. But he was to hear it in words spoken with the 
torrid eloquence of madness. 











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CHAPTER XXX 


THE AVENGER 

I T was a hot night up at the fort, a night eloquent 
of the coming rains. The door of the guest house 
stood open and the light of the paraffin lamp lay 
upon the veranda and the ground of the yard, forming 
a parallelogram of topaz across which were flitting con- 
tinually great moth shadows big as birds. 

Andreas Meeus was seated at the white-wood table 
of the sitting room before a big blue sheet of paper. 
He held a pen in his hand, but he was not writing just 
at present; he was reading what he had written. 

He was, in fact, making up his three-monthly report 
for headquarters, and he found it difficult, because the 
last three months had brought in little rubber and less 
ivory. A lot of things had conspired to make trade bad. 
Sickness had swept two villages entirely away; one vil- 
lage, as we know, had revolted; then, vines had died 
from some mysterious disease in two of the very best 
patches of the forest. All these explanations Meeus was 
now putting on paper for the edification of the Congo 
Government. He was devoting a special paragraph to 
the revolt of the village by the Silent Pools, and the 
punishment he had dealt out to the natives. Not a 

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220 , THE POOLS OF SILENCE 

word was said of torture and slaughtering. “Drastic 
Measures” was the term he used, a term perfectly well 
understood by the people to whom he was writing. 

On the wall behind him the leopard-skin still hung, 
looking now shrivelled at the edges in this extreme heat. 
On the wall in front of him the Congo bows and poisoned 
arrows looked more venomous and deadly than by the 
light of day. A scorpion twice the size of a penny was 
making a circuit of the walls just below the ceiling; 
you could hear a faint scratch from it as it travelled along, 
a scratch that seemed an echo of Meeus’s pen as it 
travelled across the paper. 

He held between his lips the everlasting cigarette^ 

Sitting thus, meditating, pen in hand, he heard sounds; 
the sound of the night wind, the sound of one of the 
soldiers singing as he cleaned his rifle — the men always 
kang over this business, as if to propitiate the gun god — 
the scratch of the scorpion and the “creak creak” of a 
joist warping and twisting to the heat. 

But the sound of the wind was the most arresting. 
It would come over the forest and up the slope and 
round the guest-house with a long-drawn, sweeping 
*‘ha-a-a-r,” and sob once or twice, and then die away 
down the slope and over the forest and away and beyond 
to the east, where Kilimanjaro was waiting for it, Crowned 
with snow on his throne beneath the stars. 

But the wind was almost dead now, the heat of 
the night had stifled it. The faintest breathing of 
air took the place of the strong puffs that had sent 
the flame of the lamp half up the glass Chimney. Afc 































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THE AVENGER 


221 


Meeus listened, on this faint breath from the forest 
he heard a sound — 

“Boom — boom” — very faint, and as if someone were 
striking a drum in a leisurely manner. 

“Boom — boom.” 

A great man-ape haunted this part of the forest of 
M’Bouga like an evil spirit. He had wandered here, 
perhaps from the west coast forests. Driven away from 
his species- -who knows — for some crime. The natives 
of the fort had caught glimpses of him now and then; he 
he was huge and old and gray, and now in the darkness 
of the forest was striking himself on the chest, standing 
there in the gloom of the leaves, trampling the plantains 
under foot, taller than the tallest man, smiting himself 
in the pride of his strength. 

“ Boom — boom.” 

It is a hair-lifting sound when you know the cause, 
but it left Meeus unmoved. His mind was too full of 
the business of writing his report to draw images 
or listen to imagination; all the same, this sinister 
drum-beat acted upon his subconscious self and, scarcely 
knowing why he did so, he got up from the table and 
came outside to the fort wall and looked over away 
into the dark. 

There was not a star in the sky. A dense pall of 
cloud stretched from horizon to horizon, and the wind, as 
Meeus stepped from the . veranda into the darkness, 
died away utterly. 

He stood looking into the dark. He could make out 
the forest, a blackness humped and crouching in the 


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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


surrounding blackness. There was not a ray of light 
from the sky, and now and again came the drum — 

“ Boom — boom.” 

Then it ceased, and a bat passed so close that the 
wind of it stirred his hair. He spat the taint of it from 
his mouth, and returning to the house, seated himself at 
the table and continued his work. 

But the night was to be fateful in sounds and sur- 
prises. He had not been sitting five minutes when a 
voice from the blackness outside made him drop his pen 
And listen. 

It was a European voic6, shouting and raving and 
laughing, and Meeus, as he listened, clutched at the table, 
for the voice was known to him. It was the voice of 
Berselius ! 

Berselius, who was hundreds of miles away in the 
elephant country ! 

Meeus heard his own name. It came in to him out 
of the darkness, followed by a peal of laughter. Rapid 
steps sounded coming across the courtyard, and the sweat 
ran from Meeus’s face and his stomach crawled as, with 
a bound across the veranda, a huge man framed himself 
in the doorway and stood motionless as a statue. 

For the first moment Meeus did not recognize Adams. 
He was filthy and tattered, he wore no coat, and his 
hunting shirt was open at the neck, and the arms of it 
rolled up above the elbows. 

Adams, for the space of ten seconds, stood staring 
at Meeus from under his pith helmet. The face under 
the helmet seemed Cast from bronze. 






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THE AVENGER 


£23 


Then he came in and shut the door behind him, walked 
to the table, took Meeus by the coat at the back of the 
neck, and lifted him up as a man lifts a dog by the scruff. 

For a moment it seemed as if he were going to kill the 
wretched man without word or explanation, but he mas- 
tered himself with a supreme effort, put him down, took 
the vacant seat at the table and cried: 

“ Stand before me there.” 

Meeus stood. He held on to the table with his left hand 
and with his right he made pawing movements in the air. 

The big man seated at the table did not notice. He 
sat for a few seconds with both hands clasped together, 
one making a cup for the other, just as a man might 
sit about to make a speech and carefully considering 
his opening words. 

Then he spoke. 

“ Did you kill those people by the Silent Pools ?” 

Meeus made no reply, but drew a step back and put 
nut his hand, as if fending the question off, as if asking 
for a moment in which to explain. He had so many 
things to say, so many reasons to give, but he could sav 
nothing, for his tongue was paralyzed and his lips were dry, 

^ Did you kill those people by the Silent Pools?” 

The awful man at the table was beginning to work 
himself up. He had risen at the second question, and 
at the third time of asking he seized Meeus by the shoul- 
ders. “ Did you kill those people ?” 

“ Punishment,” stuttered Meeus. 

A cry like the cry of a woman and a crash that shook 
the plaster from the ceiling, followed the fatal word. 


























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224 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


Adams had swung the man aloft and dashed him against 
the wall with such force, that the wattling gave and the 
plaster fell in flakes. 

Meeus lay still as death, staring at his executioner with 
Efface expressionless and white as the plaster flakes 
around him. 

“ Get up,” said Adams. 

Meeus heard and moved his arms. 

“Get up.” 

Again the arms moved and the body raised itself, 
but the legs did not move. “I cannot>” said Meeus. 

Adams came to him and bending down pinched his 
right thigh hard. 

“ Do you feel me touching you ?” 

“ No.” 

Adams did the same to the other thigh, 

“ Do you feel that ?” 

“No.” 

“Lie there,” said Adams. 

He opened the door and went out into the night, A 
moment later he returned; after him came the two por- 
ters bearing Berselius between them. 

Berselius was quiet now; the brain fever that had 
stricken him had passed into a muttering stage, and he 
let himself be carried, passive as a bag of meal, whilst 
Adams went before with the lamp leading the way into 
'the bedroom. Here, on one of the beds, the porters laid 
their burden down. Then they came back, and under 
the directions of Adams lifted Meeus and carried him 
into the bedroom and placed him on 4he second bed. 












































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THE AVENGER 


225 


Adams, with the lamp in his hand, stood for a moment 
looking at Meeus. His rage had spent itself, he had 
avenged the people at the Silent Pools. With his naked 
hands he had inflicted on the criminal before him an 
injury worse than the injury of fire or sword. 

Meeus, frightened now by the pity in the face of the 
other, horribly frightened by the unknown thing that 
had happened to him, making him dead from the waist 
down, moved his lips, but made no sound. 

“Your back is broken,” replied Adams to the ques- 
tion in the other’s eyes. 

Then he turned to Berselius. 

At midnight the rains broke with a crash of thunder 
that seemed to shake the universe. 

Adams, worn out, was seated at the table in the living 
room smoking some tobacco he had found in a tin on 
the shelf, and listening to the rambling of Berselius. 
when the thunder-clap came, making the lamp shiver on 
the table. 

Meeus, who had been silent since his death sentence 
had been read to him, cried out at the thunder, but Ber- 
selius did not heed — he was hunting elephants under 
a burning sun in a country even vaster than the elephant 
country. 

Adams rose up and came to the door; not a drop of 
rain had fallen yet. He crossed the yard and stood 
at the fort wall looking into blackness. It was solid 
; as ebony, and he could hear the soldiers, whose huts were 
'outside the wall railing to one another. 



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226 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


A great splash of light lit up the whole roof of the forest 
clear as day, and the darkness shut down again with a 
bang that hit the ear like a blow, and the echoes of it 
roared and rumbled and muttered, and died, and Silence 
wrapped herself again in her robe and sat to wait. 

Now, there was a faint stirring of the air, increasing 
to a breeze, and far away a sound like the spinning of 
a top came on the breeze. It was the rain, miles away, 
coming over the forest in a solid sheet, the sound of it 
increasing on the great drum of the forest’s roof to a roar. 

Another flash lit the world, and Adams saw the rain. 

He saw what it is given to very few men to see. Froni 
horizon to horizon, as if built by plumb, line, and square, 
stretched a glittering wall, reaching from the forest to 
the sky. The base of this wall was lost in snow-white 
billows of spray and mist. 

Never was there so tremendous a sight as this infinite 
wall and the Niagara clouds of spray, roaring, living, 
and lit by the great flash one second, drowned out by the 
darkness and the thunder the next. 

Adams, terrified, ran back to the house, shut the door, 
and waited. 

The house was solidly built and had withstood many 
Fains, but there were times when it seemed to him that 
the whole place must be washed away bodily. Noth- 
ing could be heard but the rain, and the sound of sueh 
rain is far more terrifying than the sound of thunder or 
the rumble of the earthquake. 

There were times when he said to himself, “This can- 
not last/’ yet it lasted. With the lamp in his hand he 


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THE AVENGER 


227 


went into the sleeping room to see how Berselius and 
Meeus were doing. Berselius was still, to judge from 
the movements of his lips, delirious, and just the same. 
Meeus was lying with his hands on his breast. He might 
have been asleep, only for his eyes, wide open and bright, 
and following every movement of the man with the lamp. 

Meeus, catching the other’s eye, motioned to him to 
come near. Then he tried to speak, but the roar outside 
made it impossible to hear him. Adams pointed to the 
roof, as if to say, ‘‘ Wait till it is over,” then he came 
back to the sitting room, tore the leopard skin down 
from the wall, rolled it up for a pillow, and lay down with 
his head on it. 

He had been through so much of late that he had grown 
callous and case-hardened; he did not care much whether 
the place was washed away or not, he wanted to sleep, 
and he slept. 

Meeus, left alone, lay watching the glimmer of the 
lamp shining through the cracks of the door, and lis- 
tening to the thunder of the rain. 

This was the greatest rain he had experienced. He 
\vondered if it would flood the go-down and get at the rub- 
ber stored there; he wondered if the soldiers had deserted 
their huts and taken refuge in the office. These thoughts 
were of not the slightest interest to him, they just came 
and strayed across his mind, which was still half-para- 
lvzed by the great calamity that had befallen him. 

For the last half hour an iron hand seemed round his 
body just on a level with the diaphragm; this seemed 
growing tighter, and the tighter it grew the more difficult 






























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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


£28 

it was to breathe. The fracture had been very high up, 
but he knew nothing of this; he knew that his back was 
broken, and that men with broken backs die, but he did 
not fully realize that he was going to die till — all at once — 
his breathing stopped dead of its own accord, and then of 
its own accord went on rapidly and shallowly. Then he 
recognized that his breathing was entirely under the 
control of something over which he had no control. 

This is the most terrible thing a man can know, for it 
is a thing that no man ever knows till he is in the hands 
of death. 

It was daylight when Adams awoke, and the rain 
had ceased. 

He went to the door and opened it. It was after 
sunrise, but the sun was not to be seen'. The whole 
world was a vapour, but through which the forest was 
dimly visible. The soldiers were in the courtyard; they 
had just come out of the office where they had taken refuge 
during the night. Their huts had been washed away* but 
they did not seem to mind a bit; they showed their teeth 
in a grin, and shouted something when they saw the white 
man, and pointed to the rainswept yard and the sky. 

Adams nodded, and then went back into the house 
; and into the bedroom, where he found Meeus hanging 
head downward out of his bed 

Rubber would trouble Andreas Meeus no more N 
his soul had gone to join the great army of souls in 
the Beyond. 

It is strange enough to look upon the body of a man 






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THE AVENGER 


229 

you have killed. But Adams had no more pity or com- 
punction in his mind than if Meeus had been a stoat. 

He turned to Berselius, who was sleeping. The delirium 
had passed, and he was breathing evenly and well. There 
was hope for him yet — hope for his body if not for his 
mind. 











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CHAPTER XXXI 


THE VOICE OF THE FOREST BY NIGHT 

HE first thing to be done was to bury Meeus. 



And now came the question. How would the , 


soldiers take the death of the Chef de Poste. 
They knew nothing of it yet. Would they revolt, or 
would they seek to revenge him, guessing him to have 
been killed. 

Adams did not know and he did not care. He half 
hoped there would be trouble. The Congo had burst 
Upon his view, stripped of shams, in all its ferocity, just as 
the great scene of the killing had burst upon Berselius. 
All sorts 6f things — from the Hostage House of Yandjali 
to the Hostage House of M’Bassa, from Mass to 
Papeete's skull — connected themselves up and made 
& skeleton, from which he constructed that great and 
ferocious monster, the Congo State. The soldiers, with 
theii* filed teeth, were part of the monster, and, such was 
the depth of fury in his heart, he would have welcomed 
a fighty so that he might express with his arms what 
his tongue ached to say. 

The original man loomed large in Adams. God had 
■given him a character benign and just, a heart tempered 
to mercy and kindliness; all these qualities had been 
230 




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THE VOICE OE THE FOREST ^ 231 

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outraged and were now under arms. They had given a 
mandate to the original man to act. The death of Meeus 
was the first result. 

He went to the shelf where Meeus had kept his official 
letters and took Meeus’s Mauser pistol from it. It was 
in a holstsr attached to a belt. He strapped the belt 
round his waist, drew the pistol from the holster and 
examined it. It was loaded, and in an old cigar-box he 
found a dozen clips of cartridges. He put three of these 
in his pocket and with the pistol at his side came out into 
the courtyard. 

Huge billows of white cloud filled the sky, broken here 
and there by a patch of watery blue. The whole earth 
was steaming and the forest was , absolutely smoking. 
One could have sworn it was on fii;e in a dozen places when 
the spirals of mist rose and, j^roke and vanished like the 
steam clouds from locomotive chimneys. , j 

He crossed the courtyard to the go-down, undid the 
locking bar and found what he wanted. Half a dozen 
i mattocks stood by the rubber bales — he had noticed 
them when the stores had been taken out for the 
expedition; they were still in the same place and, taking 
< two of them, he went to the break in the wall that gave 
exit from the courtyard and called to the soldiers, who 
' were busy at work rebuilding their huts. 

They came running. He could not speak twenty words 
of their language, but he made them line up with a move- 
ment of his arm. 

Then he addressed them in a perfectly unprintable 
speech. It was delivered in : upshod American — a 





























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232 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


language he had not spoken for years. It took in each 
individual of the whole gang, it told them they were dogs 
and sons of dogs, killers of men, unmentionable carrion, 
cavotes, kites, and that he would have hanged them each 
and individually with his own hands (and I believe by 
some legerdemain of strength he would), but that they 
were without hearts, souls or intellect, not responsible 
creatures, tools of villains that he, Adams, would expose 
and get even with vet. 

Furthermore, that if by a look or movement they dis- 
obeyed his orders, he would make them sweat tears and 
weep blood, so help him God. Amen. 

They understood what he said. At least they under- 
stood the gist of it. They had found a new and angry 
master, and not an eye was raised when Adams stood 
silent; some looked at their toes and some at the ground, 
some looked this way, some that, but none at the big, 
ferocious man, with three weeks’ growth of beard, stand- 
ing before them and, literally over them. 

Then he choose two of them and motioned them to 
follow to the guest house. There he brought them 
into the sleeping room and pointed to the body of Meeus, 
motioning them to take it up and carry it out. The men 
rolled their eyes at the sight of the Che] de Poste , but they 
said no word; one took the head, the other the feet, and 
between them they carried the burden, led by their new 
commander, through the dwelling room, across the 
veranda and then across the yard. 

The rest of the soldiers were in a group near the gate, 
When they saw the two men and their burden, they set 










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THE VOICE OF THE FOREST 


233 


up a chattering like a flock of magpies, which, however, 
instantly ceased at the approach of Adams. 

He pointed to the two mattocks which he had placed 
against the wall. They understood what he meant; the 
last Chef de Poste had shot himself in the presence of the 
District Commissioner, and they had dug his grave. 

“Here/’ said Adams, stopping and pointing to a spot 
at a convenient distance from the walls. 

When the body was. buried, Adams stood for a second 
looking at the mound of earth, wet and flattened down 
by blows of the spades. 

He had no prayers to offer Up. Meeus would have 
to go before his Maker just as he was, and explain 
things — explain all that business away there at the 
Silent Pools and other things as well. Prayers over 
his tomb or flowers on it would not help that explanation 
one little bit. 

Then Adams turned away and the soldiers tfooped 
after him. 

He had looked into the office and seen the rifles and 
ammunition which they had placed there out of the wet. 
A weak man would have locked the office door and so 
have deprived the soldiers of their arms-, but Adams was 
not a weak man. 

He led his followers to the office, handed them their 
arms, carefully examining each rifle to see that it was 
‘clean and uninjured, drew them up on a lines addressed 
them in some more unprintable language but in a milder 
tone, dismissed them with a wave of his hand and returned 
to the house. 


























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234 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


As he left them the wretched creatures all gave a shout 
— a shout of acclamation. 

This was the man for them — very different from 
the pale-faced Meeus — this was a man they felt who 
would lead them to more unspeakable butchery than 
Meeus had ever done. Therefore they shouted, piled 
their arms in the office and returned to the rebuilding of 
their huts with verve. 

They were not physiognomists these gentlemen. 

Berselius awoke from sleep at noon, but he was so 
weak that he could scarcely move his lips. Fortunatelv 
there were some goats at the fort, and Adams fed him with 
goats’ milk from a spoon, just as one feeds an infant. 
Then the sick man fell asleep and the rain came down 
again — not in a thunder shower this time, but steadily, 
mournfully, playing a tattoo on the zinc roof of the 
veranda, filling the place with drizzling sounds, dreary 
beyond expression. With the rain came gloom so deep 
that Adams had to light the paraffin lamp. There were 
no books, no means of recreation, nothing to read but the 
old official letters and the half-written report which the 
dead man had left on the table before leaving earth to 
make his report elsewhere. Adams having glanced at 
this, tore it in pieces, then he sat smoking and thinking 
and listening to the rain. 

Toward night a thunderstorm livened things up a little, 
and a howling wind came over the forest on the heels of 
the storm. 

Adams came out on the veranda to listen. 

He could have sworn that a great sea was roaring below 










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THE VOICE OE THE FOREST j$T 235 

in the darkness. He could hear the waves, the boom 
and burst of them, the suck-back of the billows tearing 
the shrieking shale to their hearts, the profound and 
sonorous roar of leagues of coast. Imagination could do 
anything with that sound except figure the reality of it or 
paint the tremendous forest bending to the wind in billows 
of foliage a hundred leagues long; the roar of the cotton 
woods the cry of the palm, the sigh of the withered euphor- 
bias, the thunderous drumming of the great plantain leaves 
all joining in one tremendous symphony led by the trum- 
pets of the wind, broken by rainbursts from the rushing 
clouds overhead, and all in viewless darkness, black as 
the darkness of the pit. 

This was a new phase of the forest, which since the 
day Adams entered it first, had steadily been explaining 
to him the endlessness of its mystery, its wonder, and 
its terror. 














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CHAPTER XXXII 


MOONLIGHT ON THE POOLS 

N OW began for Adams a time of trial, enough to 
break the nerve of any ordinary man. Day 
followed day and week followed week, Berselius 
gaining strength so slowly that his companion began to 
despair at last, fancying that the main fountain and 
source of life had been injured, and that the stream would 
never flow again but in a trickle, to be stopped at the 
least shock or obstruction. 

The man was too weak to talk, he could just say “Yes” 
and “No” in answer to a question, and it was always 
“Better” when he was asked how he felt, but he never 
spoke a word of his own volition. 

Nearly every day it rained, and it rained in a hundred 
different ways — from the thunderous shower-bath rush 
'of water that threatened to beat the roof in, to the light 
Spitting shower shone through by the sun. Sometimes 
the clouds would divide, roll up in snow-white billows of 
appalling height, and over the fuming foliage a rainbow 
Would form, and flocks of birds, as if released by some 
Wizard, break from the reeking trees. Adams could hear 
their cries as he stood at the foot wall watching them 
Circle in the aii\ and his heart went out to them, for they 


236 


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MOONLIGHT ON THE POOLS 237 

were the only living things in the world around him 
that spoke in a kindly tongue or hinted at the tender- 
ness of God. 

All else was vast and of tragic proportions. The 
very rainbow was titanic, it seemed primeval as the land 
Over which it stretched and the people to whom it bore 
no promise. 

But the forest was the thing which filled Adams's 
heart with a craving for freedom and escape that rose to 
a passion. 

He had seen it silent in the dry season; he had seen it 
divided by the great rain-wall and answering the down- 
pour with snow-white billows of mist and spray; he had 
heard it roaring in the dark; it had trapped him, beaten 
him with its wet, green lands, sucked him down in its 
quagmires, shown him its latent, slow, but unalterable 
ferocity, its gloom, its devilment. 

The rubber collector who had helped to carry Berselius 
to the fort had gone back to his place and task — the forest 
had sucked him back This gnome had explained with- 
out speaking what the gloom and the quagmire, and the 
rope-like lianas had hinted, what the Silent Pools had 
shouted, what the vulture and the kite had laid bare, what 
the heart had whispered : There is no God in the forest 
of M'Bonga , no law hut the laic of the leopards no mercy 
but the mercy of Death. 

The forest had become for Adams a living nightmare 
— his one desire in life now, was to win free of it, and 
never did it look more sinister than when, rainbow-arched 
and silently fuming, it lay passive, sun-stricken, the palms 


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238 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


bursting above the mist and the great clouds rolling away 
in billows, as if to expose fully the wonder of those pri- 
meval leagues of tree-tops sunlit, mist-strewn, where the 
feathery fingers of the palms made banners of the wrack 
and the baobabs held fog-banks in their foliage. 

At the end of the third week Berselius showed signs of 
amendment. He could raise himself now in bed and 
speak. He said little, but it was evident that his memory 
had completely returned, and it was evident that he was 
•still the changed man. The iron-hearted Berselius, the 
man of daring and nerve, was not here, he had been left 
behind in the elephant country in the immeasurable 
south. 

The mist had departed entirely from his mind; his 
whole past was clear before him, and with his new mind 
he could reckon it up and see the bad and the good. Thie 
^extraordinary fact was that in reviewing this past he did 
not feel terrified — it seemed a dead thing and almost as 
the past of some other man. All those acts seem I to 
Berselius to have been committed by a man who was now 
dead. 

He could regret the acts of that man and he could 
Seek to atone for them, but he felt no personal remorse. 
“He was not I,” would have reasoned the mind of Berse- 
lius, those acts were not my acts, because now I could 
not commit them” so he would have reasoned had he 
reasoned on the matter at all. But he did not. In that 
wild outburst by the Silent Pools the ego had screamed 
aloud, raving against itself, raving against the trick that 
fate had played it, by making it the slave of two personal- 





























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MOONLIGHT ON THE POOLS 


239 


pies, and then torturing it by showing it the acts of the 
old personality through the eves of the new, 

When the brain fever had passed, it awoke untroubled; 
the junction had been effected, the new Berselius was It, 
and all the acts of the old Berselius were foreign to it and 
far away. 

It is thus the man who gets religion feels when the 
great change comes on his brain. After the brain-storm 
and the agony of new birth comes the peace and the feel- 
ing that he is “another man,” He feels that all his sins 
are washed away; in other words, he has lost all sense 
of responsibility for the crimes he committed in the old 
life, he has cast them off like an old suit of clothes. The 
old man is dead. Ah, but is he? Can you atone for 
your vices bv losing your smell and taste for vice, 
and slip out of your debt for crime by becoming 
another man ? 

Does the old man ever die ? 

The case of Berselius stirs one to ask the question, 
which is more especially interesting as it is prompted by 
a case not unique but almost typical. 

The interesting point in Berselius’s case lay in the 
question as to whether his change of mind was initiated 
by the injury received in the elephant country or by the 
shock at the Silent Pools. In other words, was it due 
to some mechanical pressure on the brain produced by the 
accident, or was it due to “repentance” on seeing sud- 
denly unveiled the hideous drama in which he had taken 
part ? 

This remains to be seen. 









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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


At the end of the fourth week Berselius was able to 
leave his bed, and every day now marked a steady improve- 
ment in strength. 

Not a word about the past did he say, not a question 
did he ask, and what surprised Adams especially, not 
a question did he put about Meeus, till one day in the 
middle of the fifth week. 

Berselius was seated in one of the arm chairs of the 
sitting-room when he suddenly raised his head. 

“By the way,” said he, “where is the Che] de Porte?” 

“He is dead,” replied Adams. 

“Ah!” said Berselius, there was almost a note of relief 
in his voice. He said nothing more and Adams volun- 
teered no explanation, for the affair was one entirely 
between Meeus, himself, and God 

A few minutes later, Berselius, who seemed deep in 
thought, raised his head again. 

“We must get away from here. I am nearly strong 
enough to go now. It will be a rough journey in these 
rains, but it will be a much shorter road than the road 
we came by.” 

“How so?” 

“We came from Yandjali right through the forest 
before striking south to here, we will now make straight 
for the river, along the rubber road. I think the post 
on the river which we will reach is called IVf’Bina, it is a 
hundred miles above Yandjali; we can get a boat from 
there to Leopoldsville. I have been thinking it all out 

this morning.” 

© 

“How about a guide ? ” 










































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MOONLIGHT ON THE POOLS 


24 1 


^ These soldiers here know the rubber track, for they 
^ften escort the loads/' 

“Good,” said Adorns. “I will have some sort of litter 
rigged up and we will carry you. I am not going to let 
you walk in your present condition.” 

Berselius bowed his head. 

“I am very sensible,” said he, “of the care and attem 
tion you have bestowed on me during the past weeks. 
I owe you a considerable debt, which I will endeavour 
to repay, at all events, by following your directions 
implicitly. Let the litter be made, and if you will send 
me in the corporal of those men, I will talk to him in his 
own language and explain what is to be done.” 

“Good,” said Adams, and he went out and found the 
corporal and sent him in to Berselius. 

“Good!” The word was not capacious enough to 
express what he felt. Freedom, Light, Humanity, the 
sight of a civilized face, for these he ached with a great 
longing, and they were all there at the end of the rubber 
road, only waiting to be met with. 

He went to the fort wall and shook his fist at the forest. 

“Another ten days,” said Adams. 

The forest, whose spirit counted time by tens of thou- 
sands of years, waved its branches to the wind. 

A spit of rain from a passing cloud hit Adams’s cheek, 
and in the “hush' r of the trees there seemed a murmur 
of derision and the whfsper of a threat. 

“It is not well to shake your fist at the gods — in 
the open.” 

Adams went back to the house to begin preparations* 



THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


and for the next week he was busy. From some spare 
canvas and bamboos in the go-down he made a litter 
strong enough to carry Berselius — he had to do nearly 
all the work himself, for the soldiers were utterly useless 
as workmen. Then stores had to be arranged and put 
together in a convenient form for carrying; clothes had 
to be mended and patched — even his boots had to be 
cobbled with twine — but at last all was ready, and on 
the day before they started the weather improved. The 
sun came out strong and the clouds drew away right to 
the horizon, where they lay piled in white banks like 
ranges of snow-covered mountains. 

That afternoon, an hour before sunset, Adams 
announced his intention of going on a little expedition 
of his own. 

“I shall only be a few hours away,” said lie, “five at 
most.” 

“Where are you going?” asked Berselius. 

“Oh, just down into the woods,” replied Adams. 
Then he left the room before his companion could ask 
tiny more questions and sought out the corporal. 

He beckoned the savage to follow him, and struck 
down the slope in the direction of the Silent Pools. When 
they reached the forest edge he pointed before them and 
Said, “Matabavo.” 

The man understood and led the way, which was 
hot difficult, for the feet of the rubber collectors had 
beaten a permanent path. There was plenty of light, 
too, for the moon was already in the skv> only waiting for 
the sun to sink before blazing OXit. 



MOONLIGHT ON THE POOLS 


243 


When they were half-way on their journey heavy dusk 
fell on them suddenly, and deepened almost to dark; 
then, nearly as suddenly, all the forest around them glowed 
green to the light of the moon. 

The Silent Pools and the woods, when they reached 
them, lay in mist and moonlight, making a picture unfor- 
gettable for ever. 

It recalled to Adams that picture of Dore’s, illustrating 
the scene from the “Idylls of the King,” where Arthur 
labouring up the pass “all in a misty moonlight,” had 
trodden on the skeleton of the once king, from whose head 
the crown rolled like a rivulet of light down to the tarn — 
the misty tarn, where imagination pictured Death waiting 
to receive it and hide it in his robe. 

The skeleton of no king lay here, only the poor bones 
still unburied of the creatures that a far-off king had 
murdered. The rain had washed them about, and 
Adams had to search and search before he found what he 
had come to find. 

At last he saw it. The skull of a child, looking like 
a white stone amidst the grass. He wrapped it in leaves 
torn from the trees near by, and the grim corporal stood 
watching him, and wondering, no doubt, for what fetish 
business the white man had come to find the thing. 

Then Adams with the dreary bundle under his arm 
looked around him at the other remains and swore — u 
Swore by the God who had made him, bv the mother 
who had borne him, and the manhood that lay in 
him, to rest not nor stay till he had laid before the 
faceof Europe the skull of Papeete and the acts of 



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244 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


the terrible scoundrel who for long years had system- 
atically murdered for money. 

Then, followed hy the savage, he turned and retook 
his road. At the wood’s edge he looked back at the 
silent scene, and it seemed to look at him with the mute- 
ness and sadness of a witness who cannot speak, of a 
woman who cannot tell her sorrow. 




















































































































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Chapter xxxiii 


ll 

THE RIVER OF GOLD 

N EXT morning they started. 

The corporal, three of the soldiers, and the 
two porters made up the escort. 

Berselius, who was strong enough to walk a little way, 
began the journey on foot, but they had not gone five 
miles on their road when he showed signs of fatigue, and 
Adams insisted on him taking to the litter. 

It was the same road by which Feiix had led them, but 
it was very different travelling, where the ground had 
been hard underfoot it was now soft, and where it had 
been elastic it was now boggy; it was more gloomy, and 
the forest was filled with watery voices; where it dipped 
down into valleys, you could hear the rushing and mourn- 
ing of waters. Tiny trickles of water had become rivulets 
— rivulets streams. 

Away in the elephant country it was the same, the dry, 
river bed where they had found the carcass of the elephant, 
\vas now the bed of rushing water. The elephant and 
tintelope herds were wandering in clouds on the plains. 
A hundred thousand streams from Tanganyika to \ and- 
jali were leaping to form rivers flowing for one destination, 
the Congo and the sea. 

246 


















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246 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 

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On the second day of their journey, an accident 
happened, one of the porters, released for a #pell ; from 
bearing the litter, and loitering behind, was" bitten by 
a snake. * 

He died despite all Adams’s attempts to save him, 
and, leaving his body to be buried by the leopards, they 
passed on. 

But the soldiers, especially the corporal, took the 
matter strangely. These bloodthirsty wretches, inured 
to death and thinking nothing of it, seemed cast down, 
and at the camping place they drew aside, chattered 
together for a few minutes, and then the corporal came tb 
Berselius and began a harangue, his eyes rolling toward 
Adams now and then as he proceeded. 

Berselius listened, spoke a few words, and then turned 
to Adams. 

“He says you have brought something with you that 
is unlucky, and that unless you throw it away, we shall 
all die.” 

“I know what he means,” replied Adams, “I have 
brought a relic from that village by the Silent Po ols. 1 
^hall not throw it away. You can tell him so.” 

Berselius spoke to the man who still stood sullenly 
waiting, and who was opening his mouth to continue 
his complaints, when Adams seized him by the shoulders, 
turned him round, and with a kick, sent him back to his 
• Companions. 

“You should not have done that,” said Berselius, 

‘ “these people are very difficult to deal with.” 

“Difficult!” said Adams. He stared at the soldiers 



























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THE RIVER OF GOLD 


247 


who were grouped together, slapped the Mauser pistol 
at his side, and then pointed to the tent. 

The men ceased muttering, and came as beaten dogs 
come at the call of their master, seized the tent and put 
it up. 

But Berselius still shook his head. He knew these 
people, their treachery, and their unutterable heart- 
lessness. 

“How far are we from the river now?” asked Adams, 
that night, as they sat by the fire, for which the corporal 
by some miracle of savagery had found sufficient dry fuel 
in the reeking woods around them. 

“Another two days’ march,” replied Berselius, “I trust 
that we shall reach it.” 

“Oh, we’ll get there,” said Adams, “and shall I tell 
you why ? Well, we’ll get there just because of that relic 
I am carrying. God has given me it to take to Europe. 
To take to Europe and show to men that they may see 
the devilment of this place, and the work of Satan that is 
being carried out her.” 

Berselius bowed his head. 

“Perhaps you are right,” said he, at last, slowly and 
thoughtfully. 

Adams said no more. The great change in his 
Companion stood as a barrier between him and the 
loathing he would have felt if Berselius had been still 
himself. 

The great man had fallen, and was now very low. That 
vision of him in his madness by the Silent Pools had placed 
him forever on a plane above others. God had dealt 







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248 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


with this man very visibly, and the hand of God was 
still upon him. 

Next day they resumed their journey. The soldiers 
were cheerful and seemed to have forgotten all about their 
grievance, but Berselius felt more uneasy than ever. 
He knew these people*, and that nothing could move them 
to mirth and joy that was not allied to devilment, or 
treachery, or death. 

But he said nothing, for speech was useless. 

Next morning when they woke they found the soldiers 
gone, they had taken the porter with them, and as much 
of the provisions as they could steal without disturbing 
the white men. 

“I thought so,” said Berselius. 

Adams raged and stormed, but Berselius was perfectly 
calm. 

“The thing I fear most,” said he, “is that they have 
led us out of our road. Did ybu notice whether we were 
in the track for the last mile or so of our journey 
yesterday ? ” 

“No,” replied Adams, “I just followed on. Good 
God! if it is so we are lost.” 

Now, the rubber road was just a track so faint, that 
without keeping his eyes on the ground where years of 
travel had left just a slight indication of the way, a 
European would infallibly lose it. Savages, who have 
§yes in their feet, hold it all right, and go along with their 
burdens even in the dark. 

Adams searched, but he could find no tntck. 

“We must leave all these things behind \is> said 



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THE RIVER OF GOLD 


249 


Berselius, pointing to the tent and litter. “I am strong 
enough to walk; we must strike through the forest and 
leave the rest to chance/’ 

“Which way?” asked Adams. 

“It does not matter. These men have purposely lost 
us, and we do not know in the least the direction of the 
river.” 

Adams’s eyes fell on a bundle wrapped in cloth. It 
was the relic. 

He knelt down beside it, and carefully removed the 
cloth without disturbing the position of the skull. 

He noted the direction in which the eye-holes pointed. 

“ We will go in that direction,” said he. “ We have 
lost ourselves, but God has not lost us.” 

“ Let it be so,” replied Berselius. 

Adams collected what provisions he could carry, tied 
the skull to his belt with a piece of rope taken from the 
tent, and led the way amidst the trees. 

Two days later, at noon, still lost, unutterably weary, 
they saw through the trees before them a sight to slay all 
hope. 

It was the tent and the litter just as they had left them. 

Two days’ heart-breaking labour had brought them 
to this by all sorts of paths. 

They had not wandered in a circle. They had travelled 
in segments of circles, and against all mathematical 
probability, had struck the camp. 

But the camp was not tenantless. Someone was there'. 
A huge man-like form, a monstrous gorilla, the evil spirit 
















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250 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


that haunted the forest, bent and gray and old -looking, 
was picking the things about, sniffing at them, turning 
them over. 

When they saw him first, he was holding the tent cloth 
between both his hands just as a draper holds a piece of 
cloth, then he ripped it up with a rending sound, flung the 
pieces away, and began turning over the litter. 

He heard the steps of the human beings, and sat up 
looking around him, sniffing the air. He could not see 
them, for he was purblind. 

The human beings passed on into the terrible nowhere 
of the forest. 

When you are lost like this, you cannot rest. You 
must keep moving, even though you are all but hopeless 
of reaching freedom. 

Two days later they were still lost, and now entirely 
hopeless. 

To torment their hearts still more, faint sun rays came 
through the leaves overhead. 

The sun was shining overhead ; the sun they would never 
see again. It was the very end of all things, for they had 
not eaten for twelve hours now. 

The sun rays danced, for a breeze had sprung up, and 
they could hear it passing free and happily in the leaves 
overhead. 

Berselius cast himself down by a huge tree and leaned 
his head against the bark. Adams stood for a moment 
with his hand upon the tree-bole. He knew that when 
he had east himself do<Vn he w6uld never rise agaiii. 





























































THE RIVER OF GOLD 251 

It was the full stop which would bring the story of his life 
to a close. 

He was standing like this when, borne on the breeze 
above the tree tops, came a sound, stroke after stroke, 
sonorous and clear. The bell of a steamboat. 

It was the voice of the Congo telling of Life, Hope, 
Relief. 

Berselius did not hear it. Sunk in a profound stupor, 
he would not even raise his head. 

Adams seized his companion in his arms and came 
facing the direction of the breeze. He walked like a 
man in his sleep, threading the maze of the trees on, on, 
on, till before him the day broke in one tremendous splash 
of light, and the humble frame-roof of M’Bina seemed 
to him the roofs of some great city, beyond which the 
river flowed in sheets of burnished gold. 








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CHAPTER XXXIV 


The substitute 


ISTRICT COMMISSIONER DE WIART, <?hief 

_ C . , 



at M’Bina, was a big man with a blond beard 
and a good-natured face. He worked the ifrdst 


fit M^fiina with the assistance of a subordinate named 
Van Laer. 

De Wiart was a man eminently fitted for his post. He 
had a genius for organization 5 and overseeing. He 
would not^have been worth a centime away up-country. 


for his heart was far too good to allow him to personally 
supervise the working of the niggers, but at M’Bina he 
•Was worth a good deal to the Government that em- 


ployed him. 

This man who would not hurt a fly — this man who 


would have made an excellent father of a family — 
was terrible to his subordinates when he took a pen in his 
hand. He knew the mechanism of every Chef de Posie 
in his district, and the sort of letter that would rouse him 
lip* stimulate him to renewed action, and the slaves under 
him to renewed work. 

Van Laer was of quite a different type. Van Laer 
had the appearance of a famished hound held back by a 
leash. He was tall and thin. He had been a school- 


252 


























































































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THE SUBSTITUTE 


2.53 


master dismissed from his school for a grave offence; 
he had been a billiard-marker; he had walked the streets 
of Brussels in a frock-coat and tall hat, a “ guide” on the 
lookout for young foreigners who wished to enjoy the 
more dubious pleasures of the city. He had been many 
things, till, at the age of thirty-five, he became a servant 
of the crown. 

The pale blue eyes of Van Laer held in them a shallow- 
ness and murderous cruelty, an expression of negation 
and coldness combined with mind such as one finds 
nowhere in the animal kingdom, save that branch of it 
which prides itself on its likeness to God. His thumbs 
were cruelly shaped and enormous. A man may dis- 
guise his soul, he may disguise his mind, he may disguise 
his face, but he cannot disguise his thumbs unless he 
wears gloves. 

No one wears gloves on the Congo, so Van Laer’s 
thumbs were openly displayed. 

He had been six months now at M’Bina and he was 
sick of the place, accounts were of no interest to him. 
He was a man of action, and he wanted to be doing. He 
could make money up there in the forest at the heart of 
things; here, almost in touch with civilization, he was 
wasting his time. And he wanted money. The bonus- 
ache had seized him badly. When he saw the great tusks 
of green ivory in their jackets of matting, when he saw 
the bales of copal leafed round with aromatic unknown 
leaves, and speaking fervently of the wealth of the tropics 
and the riches of the primeval forests, when he saw the 
tons of rubber and remembered that this stuff, which 



254 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


in the baskets of the native collectors looks like fried 
potato chips, in Europe becomes, by the alchemy of trade, 
minted gold, a great hunger filled his hungry soul. 

At M’Bina great riches were eternally flowing in and 
flowing out. Wealth in its original wrappings piled itself 
on the wharf in romantical packets and bales, piled itself 
on. board steamers, floated away down the golden river, 
and was replaced by more wealth flowing in from the 
inexhaustible forests. 

The sight of all this filled Van Laer with an actual 
physical hunger. He could have eaten that stuff that 
was wealth itself. He could have devoured those tusks. 
He was Cargantua as far as his appetite was concerned, 
and for the rest he was only Van Laer driving a quill in 
the office of De Wiart. 

He did not know that he was here on probation; that 
the good-natured and seemingly lazy de Wiart was study- 
ing him and finding him satisfactory, that very soon his 
desires would be fulfilled, and that he would be let loose 
like a beast on the land of his longing, a living whip, an 
animated thumb-screw, a knife with a brain in its haft. 

When the soldiers had lost Berselius and Adams, they 
Struck at once for M’Bina, reaching it in a day’s march. 

Here they told their tale. 

Chef de Poste Meeus was dead. They had escorted a 
Sick white man and a big white man toward M’Bina. 
One night three leopards had prowled round the camp 
and the soldiers had gone in pursuit of them. 

The leopards escaped^ but the soldiers could not find 
the white men again. 



























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THE SUBSTITUTE 


255 


De Wiart listened to this very fishy tale without believ- 
ing a word of it, except in so far as it related to Meeus. 

“Where did you lose the white men?” asked de Wiart.. 

The soldiers did not know. One does not know where 
one loses a thing; if one did, then the thing would not 
be lost. 

“ Just so,” said De Wiart, agreeing to this very evident 
axiom, and more than ever convinced that the story was a 
lie. Meeus was dead and the men had come to report. 
They had delayed on the road to hold some jamboree of 
their own, and this lie about the white men was to account 
for their delay. 

“ Did anyone else come with you as well as the white 
men?” asked De Wiart. 

“Yes, there was a porter, a Yandjali man. He had 
run away.” 

De Wiart pulled his blond beard meditatively, and 
looked at the river. 

From the office where he was sitting the river, great 
with the rains and lit by the sun which had broken through 
the clouds, looked like a moving flood of gold. One 
might have fancied that all the wealth of the elephant 
Country, all the teeming riches of the forest, flowing bv a 
thousand streams and disdaining to wait for the alchemy 
of trade, had joined in one Pactolian flood flowing toward 
Leopoldsville and the sea. 

De Wiart was not thinking this. He dismissed the 
soldiers and told them to hold themselves in readiness to 
return to M’Bassa on the morrow. 

That evening he called Van Laer into the office^ 




















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256 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


“Che] de Poste Meeus of Fort M’Bassa is dead,” said 
De Wiart; “you will go there and take command. You 
will start to-morrow.” 

Van Lear flushed. 

“ It is a difficult post,” said De Wiart, “wild country, 
and the natives are the laziest to be found in the whole 
of the state. The man before Meeus did much harm, 
he had no power or control, he was a weak man, 
and the people frankly laughed at him. Actually 
rubber came in here one-third rubbish, the people were 
half their time in revolt, they cut the vines in two districts. 
I have a report of his saying, ‘There is no ivory to be 
got. The herds are very scarce, and the people sav they 
cannot make elephants.’ Fancy writing nigger talk like 
that in a report. I replied in the same tone. I said, 
'Tell the people they must make them: and make them 
in a hurry. Tell them that they need not trouble to make 
whole elephants, just the tusks will do — eighty-pound 
tusks, a hundred-pound if possible/ But sarcasm was 
quite thrown away on him. He listened to the natives. 
Once a man does that he is lost, for they lose all respect 
for him. They are just like children, these people; onee 
let children get in the habit of making excuses and you 
lose control. 

“ Meeus was a stronger man, but he left much to be 
desired. He had too much whalebone in his composition* 
not enough steel, but he was improving. 

“You will find yourself at first in a difficult positj£j|fy 
It always is so when a Che ] de Poste dies suddenly and 
€(Ven a few days elapse before he is replaced, Tfad 













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THE SUBSTITUTE 


257 


people get out of hand, thinking the white man is gone 
for ever. However, you will find yourself all right in a 
week or so, if you are firm/’ 

“Thank you,” said Van Laer. “I have no doubt 
at all that I will be able to bring these people into line. 
I do not boast. I only ask you to keep your eve on the 
returns.” 

Next day Van Laer, escorted by the soldiers, left 
M’Bina to take up the station at Fort M’Bassa left vacant 
by the death of Chef de Poste Andreas Meeus. 

JJhree day later at noon De Wiart, drawn from his house 
by shouts from the sentinels on duty saw, coming toward 
him in the blazing sunshine, a great man who stumbled 
and seemed half-blinded by the sunlight, and who was 
bearing in his arms another man who seemed dead. 

Both were filthy, ragged, torn and bleeding. The 
man erect had tied to his waistbelt by a piece of liana, a 
skull. 

Fit emblem of the forest he had passed through and 
the land that lay behind it. 


















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CHAPTER XXXV 


PAftlS 

O NE hot day in June Schaunard was seated in the 
little office just behind his shop. He was 
examining an improved telescopic sight which 
had just been put upon the market by an opponent, 
criticizing it as one poet criticizes the poem of another 
poet — that is to say ferociously. 

To him, thus meditating, from the Rue de la Paix 
suddenly came a gush of sound whi^h as suddenly ceased. 

The shop door had opened and closed again, and 
Schaunard leaving his office came out to see who the 
visitor might be. 

He found himself face to face with Adams. He knew 
him by his size, but he would scarcely have recognized him 
by his face, so brown, so thin and so different in expression 
was it from the face of the man with whom he had parted 
but a few months ago. 

“Good day,” said Adams. “I have come to pay you 
for that gun.” 

“Ah yes, the gun,” said Schaunard with a little laugh, 
“this is a pleasant surprise. I had entered it amidst 
my bad debts. Come in* monsieur* come into my office, 
it is cooler there, and we can talk. The gun* ah yfcs. I 


258 


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PARIS 


25 ^ 

had entered that transaction in Ledger D. Come in, 
come in. There, take that armchair, I keep it for visitors. 
Well, and how did the expedition go off?” 

“Badly,” said Adams. “We are only back a week. 
You remember what you said to me when we parted ? 
You said, ‘Don’t go.’ I wish I had taken your advice.” 

“Why, since you are back sound and whole, it seems 
to me you have not done so badly — but perhaps you 
have got malaria?” 

The old man’s sharp eyes were investigating the face 
of the other. Schaunard’s eyes had this peculiarity, that 
they were at once friendly to one and cruel, they matched 
the eternal little laugh which was ever springing to his 
lips — the laugh of the eternal mocker. 

Schaunard made observations as well as telescopic 
sights and wind-gauges — he had been making obser- 
vation for sixty years — he took almost as much interest 
in individual human beings as in rifles, and much more 
interest in Humanity than in God. 

He was afflicted with the malady cf the nineteenth and 
twentieth centuries — he did not believe in God, only 
instead of hiding his disease under a cloak of mechanical 
religion, or temporizing with it, he frankly declared him- 
self to be what he was, an atheist. 

This fact did not interfere with his trade — a godly 
gunmaker gets no more custom than an atheistical one; 
besides, Schaunard did not obtrude his religious opinions 
after the fashion of his class, he was a good deal of a 
gentleman, and he was accustomed to converse familiarly 
with emperors and kings. 




2m THE POOLS OF SILENCE 

“No,, it is not malaria,” replied Adams, following 
the old man who was leading the way into the office. 
“I never felt better in my life. It is just the Congo. 
The place leaves an impression on one’s mind, M. Schau- 
nard, a flavour that is not good.” 

He took the armchair which Schaunard kept for 
visitors. He was only a week back — all he had seen 
out there was fresh to him and very vivid, but he felt in 
Schaunard an antagonistic spirit, and he did not care to 
go deeper into his experiences. 

Schaunard took down that grim joke. Ledger D, placed 
it on the table and opened it, but without turning the 
leaves. 

“And how is Monsieur le Capitaine?” asked hs. 

“He has been very ill but he is much better. I am 
staying with him in the Avenue Malakoff as his medical 
attendant. We only arrived at Marseilles a week ago." 

“And Madame Berselius, how is she?” 

“Madame Berselius is at Trouville.” 

“The best place this weather. M a /of, you must 
find it warm here even after Africa — well, tell me how 
you found the gun to answer.” 

Adams laughed. “The gun went off — in the hands 
of a savage. All your beautiful guns. Monsieur Schau- 
nard, are now matchwood and old iron, tents, everything 
went, smashed to pieces. -pounded to pulp by elephants. 

He told of the great herd they had pursued and how 
in the dark it had charged the camp. He told of how in 
the night, listening by the camp fire, he had heard the 
mysterious boom of its e£ming\ -and of the marvellous 



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PARIS 


2G1 

sight he had watched when Berselius, failing in his attempt 
to waken the Zappo Zap, had fronted the oncoming 
army of destruction. 

Schaunard ’s eyes lit up as he listened. 

“Ah” said he,. “that is a man!” 

The remark brought Adams to a halt. 

He had become strangely bound up in Berselius; he 
had developed an affection for this man almost brotherly, 
and Schaunard ’s remark hit him and made him wince. 
For Schaunard employed the present tense. 

“ Yes,” - said Adams at last, “it was very grand.” Then 
he went on to tell of Berselius’s accident, but he said 
nothing of his brain injury, for a physician does not speak 
of his patient’s condition to strangers, except in the 
vaguest and most general terms. 

“And how did you like the Belgians?” asked the old 
man when Adams had finished. 

“The Belgians!” Adams/ suddenly taken off his 
guard, exploded; he had said nothing as yet about the 
Congo to anyone. He could not help himself now; the 
horrors rushed to his mouth and escaped — the cry of 
the great mournful country — the cry that he had brought 
to Europe with him in his heart, found vent. 

Schaunard sat amazed, not at the infamies pouring 
from Adams’s mouth, for he was well acquainted with 
them, but at the man’s vehemence and energy. 

“I have come to Europe to expose him,” finished 
Adams. 

“Expose who?” 

“Leopold* King of the Belgians;” 












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262 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


“But, my dear Monsieur Adams, you have come to 
waste your time; he is already exposed. Expose Leo- 
pold, King of the Belgians! Say at once that you are 
going to expose the sun. He does n’t care. He exposes 
himself. His public and his private life are common 
property.” 

“You mean to say that everyone knows what I know ?” 

“Precisely, and perhaps even more, but everyone has 
not seen what you have seen, and that ’s all the difference.” 

“How so?” 

“In this way, monsieur; let us suppose that you have 

just seen a child run over in the Rue de la Paix. You 

come in here and tell me of it; the horror of it is in vour 

%/ 

mind, but you cannot convey that horror to me, simply 
because I have not seen what you have seen. Still, you 
can convey a part of it, for I know the Rue de la Paix, it 
is close to me, outside my door, and I know French 
children. 

“You come to me and tell me of hideous sights you 
have seen in Africa. That does not move me a tenth 
so much, for Africa is very far away — it is, in fact, for 
me a geographical expression; the people are niggers I 
have never seen, dwelling in a province I have never 
heard of. You come to seek sympathy for this people 
amongst the French public? Well, I tell you frankly 
you are like a man searching in a dark room for a bl&CK 
hat that is not there.” 

’ “Nevertheless I shall search.” 

“As monsieur wills, only don’t knock yourself against 
th? chairs and tables. Ah, monsieur, monsieur* you 













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PARIS 


263 


are young and a medical man. Remain so, and don’t 
lose your years and your prospects fighting the impossible. 
Now listen to me, for it is old Schaunard of the Rue de la 
Paix who is speaking to you. The man you would 
expose, as you term it, is a king to begin with; to go on 
with, he is far and away the cleverest king in Christendom. 
That man has brains enough to run what you in American 
call a department store. Every little detail of his estate 
out there, even to the cap guns and rifles of the troops, he 
looks after himself, that ’s why it pays. It is a bad- 
smelling business, but it does n’t poison the nose of Europe, 
because it is so far away. Still, smells are brought over 
in samples by missionaries and men like you, and people 
say ‘Faugh!’ Do you think he did not take that into his 
consideration when he planned the affair and laid down 
the factory ? If you think so, you would be vastly mis- 
taken. He has agents everywhere — I have met them, 
apologists everywhere — in the Press, in Society, in the 
Church. The Roman Catholic Church is entirely his; 
he is triple-ringed with politicians* priests, publicists, 
and financiers, all holding their noses to keep out the 
stench and all singing the Lous Leopold at the top of 
their voices. 

“Ah! you don’t know Europe. I do, from the Ballplatz 
to Willhelmstrasse, from the Winter Palace to the Elysee, 
my trade has brought me everywhere, and if you could 
see with my eyes, you would see the great, smooth plain 
of ice you hope to warm with your poor breath in the 
of Humanity.” 

“At all events I shall try,” replied Adams, rising to go. 





- *«* 



264 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


“Well, try, hut don’t get frozen in making the trial 

Oh, the gun — well, look here — you are starting on 
another hunting expedition, it seems to me, a more dan- 
gerous one, too, than the last, for there is no forest where 
one loses oneself more fatally than the forest of social 
reform — pay me when you come back.” 

“Very well,” said Adams, laughing. 

“ Only if you are successful though.” 

“Very well.” 

“And, see here, in any event come and tell me the 
result. Bon jour , monsieur, and a word in vour ear — — ' “ 

The old man was opening the shop door. 

“Yes.” 

“Don’t go.” 

Schaunard closed his door and retired to his office 
to chuckle over his joke, and Adams walked off down the 
Rue de la Paix. 

Paris was wearing her summer dress; it was the end 
of the season, and the streets were thronged with foreign- 
ers — the Moor from Morocco, in his white burnous, 
elbowed the Slav from Moscow; the Eiffel Tower had 
become a veritable Tower of Babel; the theatres were 
packed, the cafes crowded. Austrian, Russian, English, 
&nd American gold was pouring into the city — pour- 
ing in ceaselessly from the four corners of the world and 
bv every great express disgorging at the Gare du Nord, 
the Gare de l’Est, and the Gare de Lyons. 

To Adams, fresh from the wilderness and the forest, 
fresh from those great, silent, sunlit plains of the elephant 
country and the tremendous cavern of the jungle, the 

































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PARIS 


265 


city around him and the sights affected him with vivid- 
ness and force. 

Here, in the centre of the greatest civilization that the 
world has ever seen, he stood fresh from that primeval 
land. 

He had seen civilization with her mask off, her hair 
in disorder, her foot on the body of a naked slave and 
the haft of a blood-stained knife between her teeth, he 
was watching her now with her mask on, her hair in pow- 
der, Caruso singing to her; sitting amidst her court of 
poets, philosophers, churchmen, placemen, politicians, 
and financiers. 

It was a strange experience. 

He took his way down the Rue de Rivoli and then 
to the Avenue Malakoff, and as he walked the face of 
the philosophic Schaunard faded from his mind and was 
replaced by the vision of Maxine Berselius. Opposites 
in the world of thought often awaken images one of 
the other, just because of the fact that they are opposites,. 

Maxine was not at Trouville. She had met them at 
the railway station on the day of their arrival. 

La Joconde had been cabled for from Leopoldsville-, 
and the great yacht had brought them to Marseilles. 
Nothing had been cabled as to Berselius’s accident or 
illness, and Madame Berseliiis had departed for Trouville, 
quite unconscious of anything having happened to her 
husband. 

Maxine was left to discover for herself the change in 
her father. She had done so at the very first sight of hifrU 
but as yet she had said no word* 
















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CHAPTER XXXVI 


DREAMS 

W HEN- Adams arrived at the Avenue Malakoff 
he found Berselius in the library. He was 
seated in a / big armchair, and M. Pinchon, 
his secretary, a man dry-looking as an account-book, 
bald, and wearing spectacles, was just leaving the room 
with some shorthand notes of business letters to be typed. 

Berselius was much changed; his hair was quite gray, 
his eyes, once so calm, forceful, and intrinsically brilliant, 
had lost their lustre, his face wore the expression of a 
confirmed invalid. 

Great discontent was the predominant feature of this 
expression. 

It was only within the last few days that this had 
appeared. On recovering from the hardships of the 
forest and on the voyage home, though weak enough, 
he had been serene, mild, amiable and rather listless, 
but during the last few days something was visibly troub- 
ling him. 

He had “gone off,” to use an expressive phrase some- 
times employed by physicians. 

A strange thing had happened to Berselius. Ever 
since the recovery of his memory his new self had eom 



DREAMS 


267 


t^mplated the past from the heights of new birth, calmlv 
conscious of the fact that this past belonged to a man 
who was dead. The more he examined this past the 
more he loathed the man to whom it had belonged, but 
the difference between that man and himself was so pro- 
found that he felt, rightly, that he was not He. 

Three mornings ago Berselius, who rarely dreamt, 
had awakened from a long night of hunting in Dream- 
land. In Dreamland he had cast off his new person- 
ality and became his old self, and then, in his hunting 
shirt and wjth a cordite rifle in his hand, accompanied 
by the Zappo Zap, he had tracked elephant herds across 
illimitable plains. 

He had awakened to his new self again with the full 
recognition in his mind that only a few moments ago he 
had been thinking with that other man’s brain, acting 
under his passions, living his life. 

The Berselius of Dreamland had not the remotest 
connection with, or knowledge of, the Berselius of real 
life. Yet the Berselius of real life was very intimately 
connected with the Berselius of Dreamland, knew all his 
actions, knew all his sensations, and remembered them 
to the minutest detail. 

The next night he did not dream at all — not so on 
the third night, when the scene of horror by the Silent 
Pools was re-enacted, himself in the original role. The 
incidents were not quite the same, for scenes from real 
life are scarcely ever reproduced on the stage of Dream- 
land in their entirety; but they were ghastly enough in 
all conscience, and Berselius, awake and wiping the 



268 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


sweat from his brow, saw them clearly before him and 
remembered the callousness with which he had watched 
them but a few moments ago. 

No man can command his dreams; the dreaming man 
lives in a world beyond law, and it came as a shock to 
Berselius that his old self should be alive in him like this, 
powerful, active, and beyond rebuke. 

Physically, he was a wreck of his old self, but that was 
nothing to the fact which was now borne in on him — 
the fact that this new mentality was but a thin shell 
covering the old, as the thin shell of earth, with its flowers 
and pleasant landscapes, covers the burning hell which 
is the earth’s core. 

The thing was perfectly natural. A great and vivid 
personality, and forty years of exuberant and self-willed 
life had at a stroke been checked and changed. The 
crust of his mind had cooled; tempestuous passions had 
passed from the surface, giving place to kindlier emotions, 
but the furnace was there beneath the flower garden 
just as it is in the case of the earth. 

Captain Berselius was still alive, though suppressed 
and living in secrecy. At night, touched by the magic* 
wand of sleep, he became awake* and became supreme 
master of the tenement in the cellars of which he was 
condemned to sleep by day k 

So far from having been touched by death* Captain 
Berselius was now secure from death or change; a thing 
Hot to be reasoned with or altered — bey6nd htim&rt 
control — yet vividly alive as the fabled monster th&{ 
inhabits the cellars of Glamis Castle* 






















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DREAMS 


269 


Between the dual personalities of the man complete 
fission had taken place, a terrible accident of the sort 
condemning the cast-off personality to live in darkness 
beyond the voice of mind or amendment. 

“Well/* said Adams as he entered the room. “How 
are you to-day ?” 

“Oh r about the same, about the same. If I could 
sleep properly I would mend, but my sleep is broken.” 

“I must give you something to alter that.” 

Berselius laughed. 

“Drugs ?” 

“Yes, drugs. We doctors cannot always command 
health, but we can command sleep. Do you feel your- 
self able to talk for a bit ?” 

“Oh, yes, I feel physically well. Sit down, you will 
find some cigars in that cabinet.” 

Adams lit a cigar and took his seat in an armchair 
close to his companion. All differences of rank and 
wealth were sunk between these two men who had gone 
through so much together. On their returns when 
Berselius had desired Adams to remain as his medical 
attendant, he had delegated M. Pinchon as intermediary 
to deal with Adams as to the financial side of the 
question. 

Adams received a large salary paid monthly in advance 
by the secretary. Berselius did not have any hand in 
the matter, thus the feeling of employer and employed 
Was reduced to vanishing point and the position rendered 
tnore equal. 

“You know*” said Adams* “I have always been glad 
































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270 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


to do anything I can for you, and I always shall he, hut 
since I have come back to Paris I have been filled with 
unrest. You complain of sleeplessness — well, that is my 
disease.” 

“Yes?” 

“It ’s that place over there, it has got into my blood. 
I declare to God that I am the last man in the world to 
sentimentalize, but that horror is killing me, and I must 
act — I must do something — even if I have to go into 
the middle of the Place de la Concorde and shout it aloud. 
I shall shout it aloud. I ’m not made so that I can 
stand seeing a thing like that in silence.” 

.Berselius sat with his eyes fixed on the carpet; he 
seemed abstracted and scarcely listening. He knew 
perfectly well that Adams was acquainted with the 
affair at the Silent Pools, but the subject had never been 
mentioned between them, nor was it now. 

“That missionary I met on the return home at Leopolds- 
ville,” went on Adams, “he was a Baptist, a man, not a 
religion-machine. He gave me details from years of 
experience that turned my heart in me. With my own 
eyes I saw enough — — ” 

Berselius held up his hand. 

“Let us not speak of what we know,” said he. “The 
thing is there — has been there for years — -ean you 
destroy the past?” 

“No; but one can improve the future.' Adams 
'got up and paced the floor. “ Now, now as I am talking to 
you, that villainy is going on; it is like knowing that a 
murder is slowly being committed in the next house 


























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DREAMS 


271 


and that one has no power to interfere. When I look at 
the streets full of people amusing themselves; when I 
see the cafes crammed, and the rich driving in their car- 
riages; the churches filled with worshippers worship- 
ping a God who serenely sits in heaven without stretch- 
ing a hand to help His poor, benighted creatures — 
when I see all this and contrast it with what I have seen, 

I could worship that!" 

He stopped, and pointed to the great gorilla shot years 
ago in German West Africa by Berselius. “That was 
a being at least sincere. Whatever brutalities he com- 
mitted in his life, he did not talk sentiment and religion 
and humanitarianism as he pulled his victims to pieces, 
and he did not pull his victims to pieces for the sake of 
gold. He was an honest devil, a far higher thing than 
a dishonest man.” 

Again Berselius held up his hand. 

“What would you do?” 

“Do? I’d break that infernal machine which calls 
itself a State, and I ’d guillotine the ruffian that invented 
it. I cannot do that, but I can at least protest.” 

Berselius, who had helped to make the machine, and 
who knew better than most men its strength, shook 
his head sadly. 

“Do what you will,” said he. “If you need money 
toy funds are at your disposal* but you cannot destroy 
the past.” 

Adams, who knew nothing of Berselius’s dr^atfi* 
Obsession, could not understand the full meaning of 
th£s6 words. 
































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272 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


But he had received permission to act, and the prom- 
ise of that financial support without which individual 
action would be of no avail. 

He determined to act; he determined to spare neither 
Berselius’s money nor his own time. 

But the determination of man is limited by circum- 
stance, and circumstance was at that moment preparing 
and rehearsing the last act of the drama of Berselius., 














































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CHAPTER XXXVII 

BERSELIUS BEHOLDS HIS OTHER SELF 

O N THE morning after Berselius’ conversation with 
Adams, Berselius left the Avenue Malakoff, 
taking his way to the Avenue des Champs 
Elysees on foot. 

The change in the man was apparent even in his 
walk. In the old days he was rapid in his movements, 
erect of head, keen of eye. The weight of fifteen years 
seemed to have suddenly fallen on his shoulders, how- 
ing them and slowing his step. He was in reality 
carrying the most terrible burden that a man can 
carry — himself. 

A self that was dead, yet with which he had to live. 
A past which broke continually up through his dreams. 

He was filled with profound unrest, irritation and revolt; 
everything connected with that other one, even the money 
he had made and the house he had built for himself and the 
pursuits he had followed, increased this irritation and 
revolt. He had already formed plans for taking a new 
house in Paris, but to-day, as he walked along the streets, 
he recognized that Paris itself was a house, every corner of 
which belonged to that other one’s past. 

In the Avenue Champs Elysees, he hailed a fiacre 
273 





THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


m 

and drove to the house of his lawyer, M. Cambon, which 
was situated in the Rue d’Artiles, 

Gambon had practically retired from his. business, which 
was carried oa now by his son. But for a few old and 
powerful clients, such as Berselius, he still acted personally, 

He was at home, and Berselius was shown into a draw- 
ing room, furnished heavily after the heart of the prosper- 
ous French bourgeois. 

He had not to wait long for the appearance of the 
lawyer, a fat, pale-faced gentleman, wearing gold-rimmed 
spectacles, tightly buttoned up in a frock coat, the button- 
hole of which was adorned with the red rosette of the 
Legion of Honour. 

Cambon had known Berselius for years. The two 
men were friends, and even more, for Cambon was the 
deposiory of Berselius’s most confidential affairs. 

“Well,” said the lawyer, “you have returned. I saw 
a notice of your return in the Echo de Paris , and indeed, 
this very day I had promised myself the pleasure of calling 
on you. And how is Madame Berselius ?” 

“She is at Trouville.” 

“I had it in my mind that you proposed to remain away 
twelve months.” 

“Yes, but our expedition came to an end.” 

Berselius, in a few words, told how the camp had 
been broken up, without referring however to his accident; 
and the fat and placid Cambon listened, pleased as a child 
with the tale. He had never seen an elephant except at 
the Jardin d’Acclimatation. He would have run from a 
milch-cow. Terrible in the law courts, in life he was the 



BERSELIUS BEHOLDS HIS OTHER SELF 275 

mildest of creatures, and the tale had all the attraction 
that the strong has for the weak and the ferocious for the 
mild. 

But even as he listened, sitting there in his armchair, 
he was examining his visitor with minute attention, trying 
to discover some clue to the meaning of the change in him. 

“And now,” said Berselius, when he had finished, “to 
business.” • 

He had several matters to consult the lawyer about, 
and the most important was the shifting of his money 
from the securities in which they were placed. 

Gambon, who was a large holder of rubber industries, 
grew pale beneath his natural pallor when he discovered 
that Berselius was about to place his entire fortune else- 
where. 

Instantly he put two and two together. Berselius’s 
quick return, his changed appearance, the fact that 
suddenly and at one sweep he was selling his stock. All 
these pointed to one fact — disaster. 

The elephant story was all a lie, so resolved Cambon. 
and, no sooner had he bowed his visitor out, than he rushed 
to the telephone, rang up his broker, and ordered him to 
Sell out his rubber stock at any price. 

Berselius, when he left the lawyer’s house, drove to his 
club. The selling of his rubber industry shares had been 
prompted by no feeling of compunction, it was an act 
entirely dictated by the profound irritation he felt against 
the other one who had made his fortune out of those same 
rubber industries. 

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276 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


infernal entity that dominated him by night. Surely it 
was enough to be that other one at night, without being 
perpetually haunted by that other onas traces by day. 

In the Place de L’Opera, his fiacre paused in a crowd 
of vehicles. Berselius heard himself hailed . He turned 
his head. In a barouche drawn up beside his carriage, 
was seated a young and pretty woman. It was Sophia 
Melmotte, a flame from his past life, burning now for a 
space in the life of a Russian prince. 

“ Ma foi” said Sophia, as her carriage pushed up till 
it was quite level with Berselius. “So you are back from 
— where was it you went to ? And how are the tigers ? 
Why, heavens, how you are changed! How gloomy you 
look. One would think you had swallowed a hearse and 
had not digested the trappings ” 

To all of which Berselius bowed. 

“ You are just the same as ever/’ said he. 

The woman flushed under her rouge, for there was 
Something in Berselius’ tone that made the simple words an 
insult. Before she could reply, however, the block in the 
traffic ceased, and as the carriage drove on Berselius 
bowed again to her coldly, and as though she were a 
Stranger with whom he had spoken for a moment, and 
whom he had never seen before. 

At the club in the smoking-room, where he went for an 
absinthe before luncheon, he met Colonel Tirard, the very 
man who had presided at the banquet given to him on the 
day of his leaving for Africa. This man, who had been his 
friend, this man, in whose society he had always felt plea- 
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BERSELIUS BEHOLDS HIS OTHER SELF 277 


weird fact was borne in on the mind of Berselius that Tirard 
was not talking to him. Tirard was talking to the man 
who was dead — the other Berselius. The new rifle for 
the army, which filled Tirard’s conversation, would have 
been an interesting subject to the old Berselius; it was 
absolutely distasteful to the new. 

Now, for the first time, he quite clearly recognized 
that all the friends, pursuits, and interests that had filled 
his life till this, were useless to him and dead as the cast- 
off self that had once dominated his being. Not only 
useless and dead, but distasteful in a high degree. He 
would have to recreate a world of interests for himself 
out of new media. He was living in a world where all the 
fruit and foliage and crops had been blighted by 
some wizard’s wand; he would have to replant it over 
anew, and at the present moment he did not know where 
to cast about him for a single seed. 

Yet he did not give in all at once. Like a person per- 
sisting in some disagreeable medicine, hoping to become 
accustomed to it, he continued his converastion with 
Tirard. 

After luncheon, he sat down to a game of ecarte in the 
card-room with an old acquaintance, but after half an 
hour’s play he left the table on the plea of indisposition and 
left the club, taking his wav homeward on foot. 

Near the Madeleine occurred one of those incidents 
which, in tragic lives appear less incidents than occur- 
rences prepared by Fate, as though she would say, “ Look 
and deny me if you dare.” 

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278 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


by two magnificent horses, and in the victoria lolled a man. 
An old man with a gray beard, who lolled on the cushions 
of the carriage, and looked about him with the languid 
indifference of a king and the arrogance of a megalomaniac. 

It was Leopold, King of the Belgians. 

When Berselius's eyes fell upon that face, when he 
saw before him that man whom all thinking men abhor, 
a cold hand seemed laid upon his heart, as though in that 
person he beheld the dead self that haunted his dreams 
by night, as though he saw in the flesh Berselius, the mur- 
derer, who, by consent, had murdered the people of the 
Silent Pools; the murderer, by consent, who had crushed 
millions of wretched creatures to death for the sake of 
gold; the villain of Europe, who had spent that gold in 
nameless debauchery; the man whose crimes ought to 
have been expiated on the scaffold, and whose life ought 
to have been cut short by the executioner of justice, many 
many years ago. 

It was thus at one stroke that Berselius saw his other 
self, the self that haunted him in his dreams, saw it clearly, 
and in the light of day. 

The terrible old man in the carriage passed on his way 
and Berselius on his. 

When he reached home, in the hall, just as he was hand- 
ing his hat to a servant. Maxine appeared at the door of the 
library. Her beauty, innocence, and sweetness formed a 
strange vision contrasted with that other vision he had seen 
near the Madeleine. Was it possible that God’s world 
Could hold two such creatures, and that God’s air should 
give them breath ? For a week or ten days after this, 






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BERSELIUS BEHOLDS HIS OTHER SELF 279 

Berselius remained in his own suite of apartments without 
leaving the house. 

It was as if the sight of Leopold, so triumphantly alive 
had shown him fully his own change and his weakness 
had demonstrated to him clearly that he was hut the 
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CHAPTER XXXVII 


MAXINE 

O N THE night of the day upon which Berselius 
had paid his visit to M Bambou Adams, seated 
in the smoking room at a writing table before 
a broad sheet of white paper covered with words, 
suddenly took the paper, tore it up, and threw the pieces 
in a wastepaper basket. 

He had been trying to put in language the story of 
the Congo as it had been revealed to him. 

It was all there in his mind like a tremendous dram- 
atic poem: the great sunlit spaces of the elephant coun- 
try watched over by the vultures, the eternal and illim- 
itable forests old as Memnon, young as Spring, unwithered 
and unbroken by the suns and rains and storms of the 
ages; the river flooding to the sea, and the people to whom 
this place belonged, and the story of their misery and 
despair. 

When he contrasted what he had written with what 
was in his mind, he recognized the hopelessness of his 
attempt. He had not the power to put on paper more 
than the shadow of what he had seen and of what he knew. 

To represent that people under the heel of that Fate 
was a task for an T^schylus. 

280 



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MAXIME 


281 


Sitting thus before the picture he could not reproduce, 
there rose before his mind another picture he had seen 
that day. It was a large photograph of the Laocoon. 
He had seen it in Brentano’s window, and, now, with the 
jeye of memory, he was looking at it again. 

That wonderful work of art washed up to us by the 
ages, that epic in marble, expressed all that words refused 
to say: the father and the children in the toils of Fate; 
the hand upholding for a moment the crushing evil of 
the serpent, the face raised to a skv devoid of God or pity; 
the agony, the sweat and the cruelty, all were there; and 
as Adams gazed, the python-like lianas of the forest 
became alive in* his mind, the snake-like rubber vine 
twined in coils, circling about and crushing a nation and 
its children, remote from help and from God, as Laocoon. 
and his sons. 

Ages have passed since the sculptor of that marble 
laid down his chisel and gazed at his completed work. 
Little dreamt he that thousands of years later it would 
stand as a parable, representing civilization in the form of 
the python which he had carved with such loathing yet 
such loving care. 

Adams, in the grasp of this startling though, was 
recalled from reverie bv a sound behind him. 

Someone had entered the room. It was Maxine 
Berselius. 

They had seen very little of each other since his return. 
Adams, indeed, had purposely avoided her as much as 
it is possible for one person to avoid another when both 
are dwelling in the same house 




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282 THE POOLS OF SILENCE 

The pride of manhood warned him against this woman 
who was rich and the daughter of the man from whom 
he received a salary. 

Maxine knew nothing of the pride of manhood, she 
only knew that he avoided her. 

She was dressed entirely in white with a row of pearls 
for her only ornament. She had just returned from some 
social function, and Adams as he rose to meet her noticed 
that she had closed the door. 

“Dr. Adams/’ said the girl, “forgive me for disturb- 
ing you at this hour. For days I have wished to speak 
to you about my father. I have put it off, but I feel I 
must speak — what has happened to him ?” 

She took a seat in an armchair, and Adams stood before 
her with his back to the mantelpiece and his hands 
behind him. 

The big man did not answer for a moment. He 
stood there like a statue, looking at his questioner gravely 
and contemplatively, as a physician looks at a patient 
whose case is not quite clear. 

Then he said, “You notice a change in your father?” 

“No,” said Maxine, “it is more than a change. He 
is quite different — he is another man.” 

“When we were hunting out there,” said Adams, 
“Captain Berselius had an accident. In trying to rescue 
a servant he was caught by an elephant and flung some 
distance; he hurt his head, and when he recovered con- 
sciousness his memory was quite gone. It slowy returned 

” He paused, for it was impossible to give details, 

then he went on — “I noticed, myself, as the memory 





















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28 h 


was returning, that he seemed changed; when he had 
fully recovered his memory, the fact was obvious. He 
was, as you say, quite different — in fact, just as you see 
him now.” 

“But can an injury change a person like that?” 

“Yes; an injury to the head can change a person 
completely.” 

Maxine sighed. She had never seen the dark side of 
her father; she had never loved him in the true sense of 
the word» but she had respected him and felt a pride 
in his strength and dominance. 

The man who had returned from Africa seemed to 
her an inferior being; the wreck, in fact, of the man she 
had always known. 

“And this happened to him,” said she* “when he 
was trying to save a servant’s life ?” 

“Ah,” said Adams, “if you could have seen it, you 
would have called it something even higher than that — =- 
it was a sublime act.” 

He told her the details, even as he had told them 
to Schaunard, but with additions. 

“I myself was paralyzed *—1 could only cling to the 
tree and watch. The fury of that storm of beasts com- 
ing down on one was like a wind — I can put it no other 
Way — like a wind that stripped one’s mind of every- 
thing but just the power of sight. I can imagine now 
the last day, when the sun shall be turned into dark- 
ness and the moon into blood. It was as bad as that 
'well, he did not lose his mind or nerve, he found time 
to think of the man who was lying drugged with hemp* 


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284 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


and he found courage enough in his heart to attempt 
to save him. He was fond of the man, for the man was 
a great hunter though an absolute savage, without heart 
or soul. 

“Without heart or soul ” Adams paused. There 

was something about Maxine Berselius that made her 
different from the ordinary woman one meets in life — 
vsome inheritance from her father, perhaps, who knows? 
But through the sweetness of her nature which spoke 
in voice and expression, through her loveliness and her 
womanliness, there shone a light from within. Like 
the gleam from the lamp that lives in an opal, this mind- 
brightness of Maxine’s pierced the clouds of her beauty 
capriciously, now half-veiled, now shining forth. It 
was the light of that flame which men call originality. 
Maxine saw the world by the light of her own lamp. 
Adams, though he had seen far more of the world than she, 
had seen it by the light of other people’s lamps-. 

The Hostage House of Y&ndjali would have told 
Maxine infinitely more than it told Adams. She would 
have read in Meeus’s face a story that he never deciphered j 
She would have seen in the people of the Silent Pools a 
whole nation in chains, when he with his other-people- 
begotten ideas of niggers and labour only saw a few 
’recalcitrant blacks. It wanted skulls and bones to tyring 
him to a sense of the sorrow around him; the sight of 
these people would have t6ld Maxine of their tears. 

This instinct for the truth of things made her a readet 
‘of people. Adams had interested her at first sight, 
because she found him difficult to read. She had rteVOt 


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285 


met a man like him before, he belonged to a different 
race. The man in him appealed powerfully to the 
woman in her, they were physical affinities. She had 
told him this in a hundred ways half unconsciously and 
without speech before they parted at Marseilles, but the 
mind in him had not appealed to the mind in her. She 
did not know his mind, its stature or its bent, and until 
that knowledge came to her she could not love him. 

As he stood with his back to the fireplace after that 
pronouncement on the spiritual and moral condition of 
the Zappo Zap, his thoughts strayed for a moment with 
a waft of the wing right across the world to the camping 
place by the great tree. Out there now, under the 
stars, the tree and the pool were lying just as he had seen 
them last. Away to the east the burst elephant gun was 
resting just where it had been dropped; the bones of the 
giraffe, clean-picked and white, were lying just where 
the gun had laid them; and the bones of the man who 
had held the gun were lying just where the leopards had 
Jeft him. 

Adams knew nothing of this triangle drawn by death; 
he still fancied the Zappo Zap alive and deadly. Stirred 
into speech by that thought he went on ; 

A cannibal — a creature worse than a tiger — that 
Was the being for whom your father risked his life.” 

“A cannibal?” said Maxine, opening her eves wide. 

‘‘Yes; a soldier of the Government who was detailed 
to act as our guide.” 

“A soldier — but what Government employs cannibals 
as Soldiers ?” 




















































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286 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


“Oh,” said Adams, “they call them soldiers, that is 
just a name. Slave drivers is the real name, but the 
Government that employs them does not use the word 
slave — oh, no, everyone would be shocked — scoundrels /” 

He spoke the word with suddenly flashing eyes, uplifted 
head, and a face as stern the face of Themis. He seemed 
for a moment fronting some invisible foe, then, smother- 
ing his wrath, he went on: 

“I lose control of myself when I think of what I have 
seen — the suffering, the misery, and the wretchedness. 
I saw enough at first to have made me open mv eyes, but 
the thing was not shown to me really till I saw the bones of 
murdered people — people whom I had seen walking 
about alive — lying there a few weeks later, just skeletons; 
a little child I had talked to and played with ” 

He stopped and turned to the fireplace and rested 
his elbow on the mantel. He had turned his back on 
Maxine, and volumes could not have said more than what 
was expressed by that abrupt stoppage of speech and 
turning away. 

The girl scarcely breathed till the man turned from the 
mantelpiece and faced her again. There was no trace 
of emotion on his face, but the trace of a struggle with ib 
Maxine’s eyes were filled with tears. 

“I am sorry,” said he, “that I should have dragged 
this subject before you at all. Why should I torment 
your heart as well as my own ? M 

She did not reply for a moment; She was tracing the 
vague pattern of the carpet with her eyes, her chin rest- 
ing on her hand, and the light from above made a halo 

















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287 


MAXINE 

of the burnished red-gold hair that was her crowning 
charm . 

Then she said, speaking slowly, “I am not sorry. 
Surely if such things are, they ought to be known. Why 
should I turn away my face from suffering? I have 
never done so in Paris, and I have seen much of the 
misery of Paris, for I have gone amongst it as much as 
a girl can, but what you tell me is beyond what I have 
ever heard of, or read of, or dreamed. Tell me more, 
give me facts; for, frankly, though I believe you, I can- 
not yet fully realize, and with my mind fully believe. 
I am like Thomas, I must put my fingers in the wounds.” 

Are you brave enough to look at material evidence ?” 
asked Adams. 

“Yes; brave enough to face the suffering of others 
if not my own ” 

He left the room and in a few minutes later returned 
with a parcel. He took from it the skull he had brought 
with him through everything to civilization, 

Maxine’s eyes dilated when she saw the thing, but 
she did not turn pale, and she looked steadfastly at it 
as Adams turned it in his hands and showed her by 
the foramen magnum the hacks in the bone caused by 
the knife. 

She put out her finger and touched them, then she 
said, “I believe.” 

Adams put the skull on the table; curious and small 
and ferocious and repellent it looked. One would 
never have imagined the black face, the grin, and the 
rolling eyes of the creature to whom it had once belonged*. 




























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One thing only about it touched the heart with sadness — 
its size. 

“It is a child’s,” said Maxine. 

“Yes; the child I told you of — all that remains of it. 

He was about to wrap the thing up again when the girl 
interposed . 

“Let it lie there whilst you tell me; it will bring things 
nearer to me. I am not afraid of it — poor, poor creature. 
Tell me all you know — tell me the worst. I am not a 
young lady for the moment, please, just a person listening.” 

He took his seat in an armchair opposite to her, and 
resting his elbows on his knees, talking just as if he were 
talking to a man, found the words he could not find when, 
pen in hand, half an hour ago, he had tried to express 
himself in writing. 

He told of the Hostage House at Yandjali, and the 
wretched creatures penned like animals eating their 
miserable food; he told of M'Bassa and the Hostage 
House there, with its iron rings and chains; he told how 
all over that vast country these places were dotted, not 
by the hundred but by the thousand; he told of the misery 
of the men who were driven into the dismal forests, slaves 
of masters worse than tigers, and of a task that would 
never end as long as rubber grew and Christ was a name 
in Europe and not a power; he told the awful fact that 
murder there was used every day as an agricultural 
implement, that people were operated upon, and suf- 
fered amputation of limbs, not because of disease; and 
that their sex and age — those two last appeals of Nature 
to brutality — had no voice; he told the whole bitter tale 















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Maxine 


289 


M tears and blood, but he could not tell her all, for she 
was a girl, and it would be hard to speak even before 
a man of the crimes against Nature, the crimes against 
men, against women, and against children, that even if 
the Congo State were swept away to-morrow, will leave 
Belgium’s name in the world’s history more detestable 
than the names of the unspeakable cities sunk in the 
Dead Sea. 

Maxine listened, entranced, swayed between the terror 
of the tale and the power of the man who was telling it. 

Ah! if he could have spoken to Europe as he spoke 
to her; if he could have made Europe see as he made her 
see, what a whirlwind of indignation would have arisen; 
but he could not. 

It was the magnet of her sympathy that marshalled 
the facts, clad them in burning language, and led them 
forth in battalions that stormed her mind and made her 
believe what seemed unbelievable. Without that sym- 
pathy, his words would have been cold and lifeless state- 
ments bearing little conviction. 

When he had finished, she did that which a woman 
never does unless moved by the very highest excitement. 
She rose up and paced the floor thrice. Without speak- 
ing, she walked the length of the room, then she turned 
to Adams. 

“ But this must cease/’ 

“This shall cease,” said he, “if I can only make myself 
heard. To-day — to-night — just before you catfie in, 
I was trying to put the thing on paper — trying to put 
down what I have seeti with my Own eyes,* and heard 















































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290 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


with my own ears, but the ink seems ice. What I write 
seems nothing, nothing beside what I have seen. The 
mere statement that so many were killed, so many were 
tortured*, conveys nothing of the reality. The thing is 
too big for me. God made it I suppose; but I wish to 
God I had never seen it.” 

Maxine was standing now with her hands resting 
on the back of an armchair. She seemed scarcely lis- 
tening to what her companion was saying. She was 
listenings but she was thinking as well. 

“You cannot do everything yourself/’ said she, at 
last. “You must get others to help* and in this I can, 
perhaps, assist you. Will you go to-morrow and see 
Monsieur Pugin ? I do not know him personally, but I 
know a friend of his. I will send him a note early 
to-morrow morning, and the servant can bring back the 
letter of introduction. You could call Upon him to-morrow 
afternoon.” 

“Who is Monsieur Pugin ?” 

This question, showing such a boundless ignorance 
of every-day French life and literature, rather shocked 
Maxine. She explained that Ary Pugin, the author of 
“Absolution” and twenty other works equally beautiful, 
'was above all other men fitted to bring home to France 
the story of this great sin. “Absolution,” that masterpiece, 
had shown France her cruelty in the expulsion of the 
Religious orders. France had read it weeping, drying 
her tears with one hand and continuing the expulsion 
Of the religious orders with the other. 

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2m 


his best. It was not his fault that logic and sentiment 
are so largely constituent of the French nature, mak- 
ing between them that paradox, the French mind. 

“I will go and see him,” said Adams, when the girl 
had explained what Pugin was, what Pugin did, and what 
Pugin had written. “A man like that could do more 
with a stroke of his pen, than I with weary years 
of blundering attempts to write. I can never thank 
you enough for listening to me. It is strange, but 
half the weight of the thing seems to have passed from 
my mind.” 

“To mine,” she replied. Then, with charming naivete 
she held out both hands to him. 

“ Good night.” 

As he held the door open, and as she passed out, he 
realized that, during the last few months, his faith in the 
goodness of God — the old simple faith of his childhood — 
had been all but stolen by ferocious and fiendish hands 
from his mind, and that just now, in some miraculous way, 
it had been returned. 

It was as though the gentle hands of Maxine had put 
it back. 

Maxine, when she reached her own apartments, turned 
on the electric light in her sitting room, and sat down at 
once to write to the friend who was a friend of Pugin's. 

This friend was Sabatier. 

She had studied art under him, and between artist 
hnd pupil lay that mysterious bond which unites crafts- 
men. For Maxine was great in knowledge and power,, 
and above all in that instinct without which an artist 


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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


292 

is at best an animated brush, a pencil under the dominion 
of mechanical force. 

As she wrote, she little dreamed that the sympathy 
burning in her heart and moving to eloquence her pen, 
was a thing born not from the sufferings of an afflicted 
people, but of the love of a man. A child of her mind 
begotten by the man she had just left, and who, that 
night, she had learned to love. 



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CHAPTER XXXIX 


PUGIN 

P UGIN lived in the Boulevard Haussmann. He 
had begun life quite low down in the Parisian 
world on the quays as apprentice to Manasis, 
a jew book-dealer, who has been dead twenty-five years, 
whose money has been dispersed, whose name has been 
forgotten, of whom nothing remains on earth but the 
few hours a day of time filched from him by Pugin. 

Pugin had a hard and bitter fight for twenty years 
before he obtained recognition. The garret and star- 
vation act had been unduly prolonged in the case of this 
genius, and it seemed a mystery where and how in the 
ruined city which is at the heart of every city, in that 
corn des M iracles where the Bohemians camp* he had 
found, like a crystal vase, his exquisite style* preserved 
it unbroken by mischance or shock of fate, and carried 
it safely at last to the hands of Fame. 

He was very rich now, very powerful, and very for- 
tunate. Charitable, too, and ever ready to assist a fellow 
worker in straitened circumstances, and to-day as he sat 
reading in the cool recesses of his library, and listening 
to the sound of the Paris he loved floating in with the 
Warm June air through the open window, he felt at 
293 














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294 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


peace with all the world and in a mood to do justice to 
his bitterest enemy. 

The striped sun-blinds filtered the blaze outside, let- 
ting pass only a diffused and honey-coloured twilight; 
a great bowl of roses filled the room with the simple and 
deep poetry of summer,- the story of the hedges and the 
fields, of orchards shot through with the voices of birds, 
of cattle knee-deep in cool water where the dragon-flies 
keep up their eternal dance to the flute-like ripple of the 
river amidst the reeds. 

Pugin, his book upon his knees, was enjoying these 
pictures of summer woven by perfume, when a servant 
entered and handed him Adams’s card and the letter of 
introduction written by Sabatier. 

He ordered the visitor to be shown in. Adams, when 
he entered, found himself before a small man with a 
big head; an ugly little man,, with a look of kindness 
and a very gracious and charming manner. 

To Pugin Adams seemed a giant. A giant bronzed 
by unknown suns, talking French indifferently well, 
and with a foreign accent. An interesting person, indeed, 
but a being quite beyond his range of knowledge. 

Pugin, in physical matters, was timid as a rabbit. 
He had never travelled farther than Trouville or Ostend. 
and when he indicated a chair, and when these two sat 
down to talk to each other, the mastiff-man felt instinc- 
tively the presence of the rabbit-man, and was at a loss 
how to begin. 

Not for long, though. Bluffly, and with little grace 
enough, but with earnestness and a cunning one would 




















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PUGIN 


295 


never have suspected, he told of Maxine’s great admira- 
tion for the author’s work, and how she had suggested 
the enlistment of the said author in the crusade against 
crime which he, Adams, was endeavouring to raise. 

Pugin listened, making little bows, sniffing the lettuce 
which the mastiff-man had so cunningly placed before 
his nose. 

Then honestly and plainly and well, Adams told his 
tale, and the rabbit held up its hands in horror at the 
black doings disclosed to it. But it was horror divorced 
from sentiment. Pugin felt almost as great a revulsion 
toward the negroes upon whom these things were done 
as toward the doers. 

He could not see the vast drama in its true proportions 
and its poetical setting of forest, plain, and sky. The 
outlandish names revolted him, he could not see Yand- 
jali and its heat-stricken palms or M’Bassa burning in 
the sun. 

But he listened politely and it was this that chilled the 
heart of the story-teller who instinctively felt that though 
he had shocked his hearer, he had not aroused that high 
spirit of revolt against injustice which converts a man 
into a living trumpet, a living axe, or a living sword. 

Pugin would have been a great force could his senti- 
anent have been awakened: but he could not see palm trees. 

“What would you have? You cannot grow baobabs 
on the Boulevards.” 

“ Ma foil ” said he, “it is terrible what you tell me, 
but what are we to do?” 

“I thought you might help,” said Adams* 














































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296 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


“I? With all the power possible and goodwill. It 
is evident to me that should you wish for success in this 
matter, you should found a society.” 

“Yes?” 

“There is nothing done in a public way without coop- 
eration. You must found a society; you may use my 
name. I will even let you put it on the committee list. 
I will also subscribe.” 

Now Pugin was on the committee lists of half a dozen 
charitable and humanitarian concerns. His secretary 
had them all down in a book; but Pugin himself, lost in 
his art and the work of his life, had forgotten their vety 
names. So would it be with this. 

“Thanks,” said the visitor. 

Pugin would lend his purse to the cause, and his name, 
but he would not lend his pen — simply because he could 
not. To every literary man there are dead subjects, 
this question was dead to the author of "‘Absolution” — 
as uninspiring as cold mutton. 

“Thanks,” said Adams, and rose to take his leave. 
His rough-hewn mind understood with marvellous per- 
spicuity Pugin’s position. 

“And one moment,” cried the little man, after he had 
bidden his visitor good-bye and the latter was leaving 
the room. ‘"One moment; why did I not think of it 
before, you might go and see Ferminard.” 

He ran to a desk in the corner of the room, took a visit- 
ing card and scribbled Ferminard’s address upon it, 
explaining as he wrote that Ferminard was the deputy 
for in Provence; a Socialist it is true, but a terrible 








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PUGIN 


297 


man when roused; that the very name of injustice was 
sufficient to bring this lion from his den. 

“Tell him Pugin said so/’ cried he, following his 
visitor this time out on the landing and patting him on 
the shoulder in a fatherly manner, “and you will find 
him in the Rue Auber, No. 14; it is all on the card; and 

convey my kind regards to Mademoiselle , that 

charming lady to whose appreciation of my poor work I 
owe the pleasure of your visit.” 

“Nice little man,” said Adams to himself as he walked 
down the Boulevard Haussmann. 

He found Ferminard at home, in an apartment smell- 
ing of garlic and the south. Ferminard, a tall, black- 
bearded creature, with a glittering eye; a brigand from 
the Rhone Valley who had flung himself into the politics 
of his country as a torpedo flings itself into the sea, greeted 
Adams with effusion, when he read Pugin’s card; gave 
him cigarettes, and shut the open window in honour of 
his guest. 

He worked himself into a state of indignation over 
Adams’s story, as a matter of fact he knew the whole 
thing well; but he was too polite to discount his 
visitor’s grievance, besides it gave him an opportunity 
to declaim — and of course the fact that a king was 
lit the bottom of it all, added keenness to the arrows 
of his invective. 

As Adams listened, delighted to have awakened such 
a trumpet; as he listened to Ferminard thundering 
against all that over there, speaking as though he were 
addressing the Chambre? and as though he had known 









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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


Africa intimately from his childhood, he noticed grad- 
ually and with alarm that the topic was changing; just 
a moment ago it was Africa and its luckless niggers; the 
Provencal imagination picturing them in glowing colours, 
and the Proven al tongue rolling off their disabilities and 
woes. One would have fancied from the fervour of the 
man that is was Ferminard who had just returned from 
the Congo, not Adams. 

Well, a moment after, and Africa had quite fallen out 
of the discussion. As a child lets a Noah’s Ark fall 
from its hands — elephants, zebras and all on to the 
floor whilst he grasps for a new toy — so Ferminard 
let Africa tumble whilst he grasped for Socialism, found 
it and swung it like a rattle, and Socialism went the way 
of Africa as he seized at last that darling toy — himself. 
The speech in its relationship to the subject in point, was 
the intellectual counterpart of the cry of those mechan- 
ical pigs which the street venders blow up, and which, 
standing on a board, scream in the face of Oxford Street, 
loudly at first, and then, as the figure collapses, weaken- 
ing in voice to the buzzing of a fly. 

Ferminard was, in fact, a great child with a good heart, 
a Provencal imagination, a power of oratory, a quick- 
ness in seizing upon little things and making them seem 
great* coupled with a rather obscure understanding 
as to the relative value of mountains and mole hills. 
A noise maker of a first-class description, but useless for 
any serious work. Feu de bruit was his motto, and he 
lived up to it. 

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PtfGIN 


299 


in some great and holy cause, that you come to some 
knowledge of the general man’s weakness and want 
of holiness — your own included. Adams* during the 
fortnight that followed his visit to Pugin* had this fact 
borne in on him. All the thinking minds of the centre of 
civilization were so busy thinking thoughts of their 
own making, that it was impossible to attract their atten- 
tion for more than a moment; from Bostoc the dramatist 
to Bastiche the anarchist, each individual was turn- 
ing his own crank diligently, and not to be disturbed, 
even by Papeete’s skull. 

With such a thing in one’s hand, picked up like some 
horrible talisman which, if not buried, will eventually 
cast its spell upon human thought and the future of the 
world. With such a thing in one’s hand, surely the 
Church would present itself to the mind as a court of 
appeal. 

But as the Roman Catholic Church had actually put 
its broad back against the door of the torture chamber, 
and was, in fact, holding it tight shut whilst Papeete’s 
head was being hacked from her body* it would scarcely 
be logical to bring out the victim’s skull hoping for redress. 
Other denominations being of such little power in 
F ranee, Adams determined to leave the attempt to 
i'ouse them till he reached England, whither he deter- 
mined to go as sdon as Berselius’s health would per- 
mit him. 

One evening, a fortnight after his visit to Pugirn on 
his return to the Avemie Malakoff* Maxine met him 
in the hall. 

















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300 THE POOLS OF SILENCE 

He saw at once from her face that something had 
happened. 

Berselius was worse; that afternoon he had suddenly 
developed acute neuralgia of the Tight side of the head, 
and this had been followed almost immediately by 
twitching and numbness of the left arm. Thenard 
had been summoned and he had diagnosed pressure on 
the brain, or, at least, irritation from depressed bone, 
due to the accident. 

He declared himself for operation, and he had gone 
now to make arrangements for nurses and assistants. 

He will operate this evening,” said Maxine. 

“ And Madame Berselius ?” 

“I have telegraphed for her.” 










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CHAPTER X£ 


fHE RETURN OF CAPTAIN BERSELIUS 

B ERSELJUS, for the last fortnight, had been 
going back, slowly going from bad to worse, 
and keeping the fact to himself. 

Sulphonal, trional, morphia, each tried in turn had 
no power to prevent him from dreaming. Sleep as 
soundly as he would, just as he was awaking, the black 
blanket of slumber, turned up at a corner or an edge by 
some mysterious hand, would reveal a dream or part of one. 

There was nothing in these dreams to terrify him 
when he was dreaming them; in them, he was just the 
old brave Berselius that nothing could terrify, but there 
was often a good deal to terrify him when he awoke. 

Many of them were quite innocent and as fatuous 
as dreams are wont to be, but even these innocent dreams 
fretted the soul of the waking man, for in every scrap 
and vestige of them he recognised the mind of that other 
personality. 

After the first few days, his intellect, so severe and 
logical, began to lose its severity and logic* and to take 
Up sides with his heart and to cry aloud against the 
injustice of this persecution. 

Why should he be haunted like this ? He felt no 
801 



THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


m2 

trace of remorse now for the past; the sense of injustice 
swallowed all that. Every day seemed to drive that past 
further off, and to increase the sense of detachment 
from that other man and his works; yet every night a 
hand like the hand of some remorseless chess plaver, 
put things back in their places. 

With the falling of the curtain of sleep he became 
metamorphosed , 

Then came the day when the evil he was suffering 
from, declared itself in a physical manner and Thenard 
was called in. 

Thenard found his patient in bed. His mind was 
quite clear, but the pupils of his eyes were unequal; 
there was numbness in the left arm and want of grip 
in the hand. He had been prepared for the change 
evident in Berselius’s face and manner, for Maxine had 
told him in a few words of the accident and loss of mem- 
ory, and as he took his seat by the bedside he was about 
to put some questions relative to the injury, when Ber- 
zelius forestalled him. 

Berselius knew something about medicine. He 
guessed the truth about his own case, and he gave a suc- 
cinct account of the accident and the loss of memory 
following it. 

“This is due to the result of the injury, is it not ?” said 
Berselius, pointing to his left arm when he had finished. 

“I am afraid so,” said Thenard, who knew his patient, ^ 
and that plain speaking would be best. 

“Some pressure ?” 

“So I imagine.” 










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THE RETURN OF CAPTAIN BERSELUIS tm 


“Oh, don’t be afraid of speaking out. I don’t mind 
the worst. Will an operation remove that pressure?” 

“If, as I imagine, there is some pressure from the 
inner table of the skull on the brain, it will. 

“Well, now,” said Berselius, “I want you to listen 
to me attentively; ever since that accident, or, at least, 
since I regained memory, I have felt that I am hot the 
same man. Only in sleep do I become myself again — 
do you understand me ? I have quite different aims 
and objects; my feelings about things are quite different; 
my past before the accident is ruled off from my present 
— that is when I am awake. 

“When I dream I become my old self again — is that 
not strange ?” 

“No,” said Thenard, “every man is double. We 
have numerous cases where, frpm accident or othef* 
circumstances, a mam’s personality changes; one side 
of his nature is suppressed. There is one strange point 
about your case, though, and that is the waking up of 
the suppressed personality so vividly during sleep; but 
in your case it is perhaps not so strange.” 

“Why not?” 

“Because, and excuse me for being personal even 
though I am complimentary, your personality as I knew 
you before your accident was so profound, and vivid, 
and powerful, that even though it is suppressed it must 
speak. And it speaks in dreams. 

“So! — perhaps you are right. Now tell me if you oper- 
ate and remove the pressure, may I become myself again r 

“You may.” 
























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304 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


“Even after all this time?” 

“The mind,” said Thenard, “has nothing to do with 
time. At the Battle of the Nile, a sea captain, one of 
those iron-headed Englishmen, was struck on his iron 
head with fragment of shell. He lost his memory. 
Eight months after he was trephined; he awoke from 
the operation completing the order he was giving to his 
sailors when the accident cut him short — — ” 

“I would he the same man. I would not be tormented 
with the other self which is me. now ?” 

“Possibly — I do not say probably* but possibly.” 

“Then,” said Berselius, “for God’s sake, operate 
at once.” 

“I would like to wait for another twelve hours,” said 
Thenard, rising and re-examining the slight dent of his 
patient’s skull. 

“Why?” 

“Well, to see if things may be cleared up a bit, and 
the necessity for operation be removed/’ 

“Operate.” 

“You know, in every operation however slight, there 
is an element of danger to life.” 

“I^ife! what do I care? I insist on your operating* 
Not another night shall pass ” 

“As you will,” said Thenard. 

“And now,” said Berselius, “make your preparations, 
&nd send me my secretary.” 

At twelve o’clock that night, Maxine was seated 
ift the librarv, with a book which she had been 




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The erturn of captain berselius 305 

vainly trying to read face downward on the floor 
beside her. 

Thenard, his assistant surgeon, and two nurses, had 
arrived shortly after ten. Operating table, instruments, 
everything necessary had been brought, set up, and fixed 
by Thenard \s own man. 

Adams had no part in the proceedings except as a 
looker-on. No man could assist Thenard in an opera- 
tion who was not broken to the job, for, when 
operating Thenard became quite a different person 
to the everyday Thenard of lecture room and hospital 
Ward . 

That harsh voice which we noticed in him in the 
first pages of this book when on entering the lecture- 
room of the Beaujon he could not find his coloured 
chalks, came out during an operation, and he would 
curse his assistant to the face for the slightest fault or 
fancied fault, and he would speak to the nurses as no 
Frenchman ever spoke to Frenchwoman unless with 
deliberate intent to insult. When the last stitch was in* 
all this changed; nurses and assistant forgot what had 
been said, and in the ease of released tension, worshipped 
tnore than ever the Cadaverous genius who was now 
unwinding from his head and mouth the antiseptic 
gauze in which he always veiled them when operating. 

The clock on the mantel pointed to a few minutes past 
the hour, when the door opened; and Adams came in. 

Maxine rose to meet him. 

She read both good and bad news in his face. 

u The operation has been successful-, but there is great 



306 


THE FOOLS OF SILENCE 


weakness/’ He rolled an armchair for her to sit down, 
and then he told her as much as she could understand. 

Thenard had found a slight depression of the inner 
table of the skull, and some congestion and thickening 
of the dura mater. It all dated from the accident. There 
would, without doubt, have been severe inflammation 
of the brain, but for Berselius’s splendid condition at the 
time of the accident, and the fact that Adams had bled 
him within an hour of the injury. Thenard had relieved 
the pressure by operation, but there was great weakness. 

It was impossible to say what the result would be yet. 

“Has he regained consciousness?” 

“He is just recovering from the anaesthetic*/’ 

The girl was silent for a moment, then she asked where 
Thenard was. 

“He has left. He has to operate again to-night on a 
case which has just called for him by telephone. He 
asked me to tell you that everything possible has been 
done. He will call in the morning, and he has left every- 
thing till then in my hands.” 

“I shall not go to bed,” said Maxine. “I could not 
sleep, and should my father want to see me, 1 shall be 
beady.” 

“Yes,” said Adams* “perhaps it will be better so. I 
will go up and stay with him, and I will call you if it is 
necessary.” 

He left the room, and Maxine took up the book she 
had dropped, but she could not read. Her eyes travelling 
about the room, rested here and there on the trophies 
and the guns and the wild implements of destruction 
















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THE RETURN OF CAPTAIN BERSEL1US 307 

collected by the hunter, who was now lying upstairs, like 
a child dandled on the dark knees of death. 

The books on philosophy, natural history, oceano- 
graphy, and history, in their narrow cases contrasted 
strangely with the weapons of destruction and the relics 
of the wild. The room was like a mirror of the mind 

Berselius, that strange mind in which the savage dwelt 
with the civilized man, and the man of valour by the side 
of the philosopher. 

But the strangest contrast in the room was effected 
by Maxine herself — the creation of Berselius — his 
child, blossoming like a beautiful and fragile flower, 
amidst the ruins of the things he had destroyed. 

When, after daybreak, Adams came to find her, she 
was asleep. 

Berselius, awaking from a sleep that had followed 
the effects of the anaesthetic, had asked for \iey. 

Thenard had fixed upon the white marble bathroom 
adjoining Berselius’s sleeping chamber as his operating 
theatre, and after the operation the weakness of the 
patient was so great, and the night so hot, they deter- 
mined to make up a bed for him there* as it was the 
coolest room in the house. 

It was a beautiful room. Walls, pillars* floor and ceil- 
ing, of pure white Carrara marble, and in the floor, near 
the window, a sunk bath, which, when not in use, wfts 
covered by a grating of phosphor bronze, showing a 
design of sea serpents and seaweed. There were no 
basins or lavatory arrangements, nothing at all to break 
the pure and simple charm of this ideal bathing-pl&Ce 


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308 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


whose open French window showed, beyond a balcony 
of marble, the tops of trees waving against the blue sky 
of early morning. 

Berselius was lying on the bed which had been arranged 
for him near the door; his eyes were fixed on the waving 
tree tops. He turned his head slightly when Maxine 
entered, and looked at her long and deliberately. 

In that one glance Maxine saw all. He was himself 
again. The old, imperious expression had returned; 
just a trace of the half-smile was visible about his lips. 

The great weakness of the man, far from veiling the 
returned personality, served as a background which made 
it more visible. One could see the will dominating the 
body, and the half-helpless hands lying on the coverlet 
presented a striking contrast to the inextinguishable 
fire of the eye. 

Maxine sat down on the chair by the bed. She did 
not attempt to stroke the hand near her, and she smothered 
whatever emotion she felt, for she knew the man who 
had returned. 

“Your mother?” said Berselius, who had just suffi- 
cient voice to convey interrogation as well as words. 

“She has not returned yet; we telegraphed for her, 
she will be here to-day.” 

“Ah!” 

The sick man turned his head again, and fixed his 
*eyes on the tree tops. 

The hot, pure, morning air came through the open 
window, bringing with it the chirruping and bickering 
t)f sparrows; a day of splendour and great heat was 








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THE RETURN OF CAPTAIN BERSELIUS 309 

Breaking over Paris. Life and the joy of life filled the 
world, the lovely world which men contrive to make so 
terrible, so full of misery, so full of tears. 

Suddenly Berselius turned his head, and his eyes found 
Adams with a not unkindly gaze in them. 

“Well, doctor,” he said, in a voice stronger than the 
^oice with which he had spoken to Maxine. “This is 
the end of our hunting, it seems.” 

Adams, instead of replying, took the hand that was 
lying on the coverlet, and Berselius returned the pressure, 
and then relinquished his hold. 

Just a handshake, yet it told Adams in some majestic 
way, that the man on the bed knew that all was up with 
him, and that this was good-bye. 

Berselius then spoke for a while to Maxine on indif- 
ferent things. He did not mention his wife’s name, and 
he spoke in a cold and abstracted voice. He seemed to 
Adams as though he were looking at death, perfectly 
serenely, and with that level gaze which never in this 
world had been lowered before man or brute. 

Then he said he was tired, and wished to sleep. 

Maxine rose, but the woman in her had to speak. 
She took the hand on the coverlet, and Berselius, who was 
just dozing off, started awake again. 

“Ah!” said he, as though he had forgotten something, 
then he raised the little hand of Maxine and touched it 
with his lips. 

It was the last act of his life, for the sleep into which 
he passed, deepened into coma, and he died on the fol- 
lowing night, peacefully as a child. 












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310 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


Whatever his life may have been, his death affected 
Adams strangely. The magnetism of the man’s char- 
acter had taken a hold upon him, fascinated him with 
the fascination that strength alone can exercise. And the 
man he regretted was not the ambiguous being, the 
amended Berselius, so obviously a failure, but the real 
Berselius who had returned to meet death. 




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CHAPTER XLI 


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AMIDST THE LILIES 

O NE day in March, nine months later, at Champ- 
rosay, in the garden of a little cottage near the 
Paris road, Maxine Berselius stood directing 
the movements of an old man in a blue blouse — Father 
Champardy by name, and a gardener by profession. 

On the death of her father, Maxine had come to an 
arrangement with her mother, eminently suited to the 
minds and tastes of both women. 

Maxine absolutely refused to touch any part of the 
colossal fortune left by her father. She knew how it 
had been come by, and as she had a small fortune of her 
own, a very small fortune of some ten thousand francs 
a year settled on her by an uncle at her birth, she deter- 
mined to live on it, and go her own way in life. 

Art was to her far preferable to society, and in a little 
cottage with one woman for a servant, ten thousand 
francs a year were affluence. 

Madame Berselius, who had no scruple in using money 
obtained in any way whatsoever, fell in with her daughter s 
views after a few formal objections. 

Gillette had furnished the cottage as only a French 
firm can furnish a cottage, and the garden, which had 
[811 








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THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


312 

gone to decay, Maxine had furnished herself with the 
help of Father Champardy. 

Adams, after the death of Berselius, had lingered on 
in Paris to settle up his affairs, going back to the Rue 
Dijon and taking up his old life precisely at the point 
where he had broken it off. 

But he was richer by three things. Two days after 
Berselius’s death, news came to him from America of the 
death of an uncle whom he had never seen and the fact 
that he had inherited his property. It was not very 
much as money goes in America, but it was real estate 
in New York City and would bring in some seven or eight 
hundred pounds a year. He was richer by the experience 
he had gained and the Humanity he had discovered in 
himself, and he was richer by his love for Maxine. 

But love itself was subordinate in the mind of Adams 
to the burning question that lay at his heart. He had 
put his hand to the plough, arid he was not the man to 
turn aside till the end of the furrow was reached. He 
would have time to go to America, in any event, to look 
&fter his property. He decided to stay some months in 
England; to attack the British Lion in its stronghold; 
Explain the infamies of the Congo, and then cross the 
Atlantic and put the matter before the American Engle. 

He did. 

For seven months he had been away-, and every week he 
had written to Maxine, saying little enough about the 
progress of his work, and frequently using the cryptic 
statement, “I will tell you everything when I come back. 

And “He will be back to-day,” murmured Maxine, 


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AMIDST THE LILIES 313 - 

as she stood in the little garden watching the old man at 
his work. 

The newness and the freshness of spring were in the 
air, snow that had fallen three days ago was nearly gone, 
just a trace of it lay on the black earth of the flower beds; 
white crocuses, blue crocuses, snow-drops, those first 
trumpeters of spring, blew valiantly’ in the little garden, 
the air was sharp and clear, and the sky above blue and 
sparkling. Great masses of white cloud filled the horizon, 
sun-stricken, fair, and snow-bright, solid as mountains, 
and like far-off mountains filled with the fascination and 
the call of distance. 

“Spring is here,” cried the birds from the new budding 
trees. 

The blackbird in Dr. Ponses garden to the left, answered 
ft rapturous thrush in the trees across the way, children’s 
voices came from the Paris road and the sounds of wheels 
and hoofs. 

A sparrow with a long straw in its beak flew right 
across Maxine’s garden, a little winged poem, a couplet 
enclosing the whole story of spring. 

Maxine smiled as it vanished, then she turned, the 
garden gate had clicked its latch, and a big man was 
coming up the path. 

There was only Father Champardy to see; and as 
his back was turned, he saw nothing and as he was deaf, 
he heard nothing. The old man, bent and warped by 
the years, deaf, and blind to the little love-scene behind 
him, was, without knowing it, also a poem of spring; but 
ftpt so joyous as the poem of the sparrow. 





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314 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


“And now tell me all,” said Maxine, as they sat in the 
ehintz-hung sitting-room before a bright fire of logs. 
They had finished their private affairs. The day was 
two hours older, and a sunbeam that had pointed at them 
through the diamond-paned window had travelled away 
and vanished. The day was darker outside, and it was 
as though spring had lost her sportive mood and then 
withdrawn, not wishing to hear the tale that Adams 
had to tell. 

In Adams’s hand Papeete’s skull had been a talisman 
of terrible and magical power, for with it he had touched 
men, and the men touched had disclosed their worth 
and their worthlessness. It had been a lamp which 
showed him society as it is. 

The life and death of Berselius had been an object 
lesson for him, teaching vividly the fact that evil is inde- 
structible; that wash yourself with holy water or wash 
yourself with soap, you will never wash away the evil 
being that you have constructed by long years of evil- 
doing and evil-thinking. 

His pilgrimage in search of mercy and redress for a 
miserable people had emphasized the fact. 

The great crime of the Congo stood gigantic, like a 
shadowy engine for the murdering of souls. 

“Destroy that,” said the devil triumphantly. “You 
Cannot, for it is past destruction; it has passed into the 
world of the ideal. No man’s hand may touch it; it is 
beyond the reach like the real self of your friend Berselius. 
Sweep the Congo State away to-morrow; this will remain. 
A thing soul-destroying till the end of time. It began 


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315 

small in the brain of one ruinous man, God whom I hate ! 
look at it now. 

44 It has slain ten million men and it will slay ten million 
more, that is nothing; it has ruined body and soul, the 
stokers who fed it and the engineers who worked it , 
that is nothing; it has tangled in its wheels and debased 
the consciences of five nations, that is nothing. It is 
eternal — - that is everything. 

44 Since I was flung out of heaven, I have made many 
things, but this is my masterpiece. If I and all my works 
were swept away, leaving only this thing, it would be 
enough. In the fiftieth century it will still have its clutch 
on man, yea, and to the very end of time.” 

Cause and effect, my friend, in those two words you 
have the genius of this machine which will exist forever 
in the world of consequence, a world beyond divine or 
human appeal. 

In England, Adams had found himself confronted 
with the dull lethargy of the people, and the indifference 
of the Established Church. The two great divisions 
of Christ’s Church were at the moment at death grapples 
over the question of Education. Only amongst the 
Noncomformists could be found any real response to the 
question which was, and is, the test questioh which will 
disclose., according to its answer, whether Christianity 
is a living voice from on high, or an echo from the Pagan 
past; and a debased echo at that. Debased, for if Adams 
could have stood in the Agora of Athens and told his 
tale of horror and truth, could Demosthenes have taken 
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316 


THE POOLS OF SILENCE 


a king in those days, and have done in those days, under 
the mandate of a deluded Greece, what he has done 
under the mandate of a deluded England; what a living 
spirit would have run through Athens like a torch, how 
the phalanxes would have formed, and the beaked ships 
at Piraeus torn themselves from their moorings, to bring 
to Athens in chains the ruffian who had murdered and 
tortured in her name. 

To complete the situation and give it a touch of hope- 
lessness, he found that others had striven well, yet almost 
vainly in the field. Me working for truth and justice 
as other men work for gold, had attacked the public 
with solid battalions of facts, tabulated infamies; there 
had been meetings, discussions, words, palabres , as they 
say in the south; but the murderer had calmly gone 
on with his work, and England had put out no hand 
to stay him. 

But it was not till he reached America, that Adams 
found himself fighting the machine itself. 

One great man with a living voice he found — Mark 
Twain — and one great paper, at least. These had 
raised their voices calling for Justice — with what result ? 

Two side facts the skull of Papeete showed to the 
searcher, as a lamp shows up others thing than the things 
Searched for. The deadness of the English Church to the 
Spiritual, and the corruption of his own countrymen. 

When he had finished, it was dark outside. The 
firelight lit up the little room. Glancing through the 
diamond-parted window at that happy interior, one would 
ftever have guessed that the man by the fire had been 




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317 


AMIDST THE LILIES 

telling the girl by his side not a love story, but the story of 
the world’s greatest crime. 

Maxine, whose hand was resting on the hand of her 
companion, said nothing for a moment after he had 
ceased speaking. Then, in a half whisper, and leaning 
her forehead on his hand, “ Poor things,” sighed Maxine. 

So attuned were her thoughts to the thoughts of her 
companion, that she voiced the very words that were 
in his mind, as gazing beyond his own happiness and a 
thousand miles of sea and forest, he saw again the moon- 
light on the mist of the Silent Pools, and the bleached and 
miserable bones v 

THE END 










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